Using the environment variables DBI_DSN, DBI_USER and DBI_PASS can be another useful way of passing the info in - and has the advantage of being built into DBI.

Yeah it certainly depends on the situation... I live in a garden of databases here... Sybase, MySQL and SQL2000... also , we have several databases on each of these whose logical information is the same (name, id, address ,email, etc...) but whose concrete field name varies. So I need to warehouse connections and table field names.

YAML was attractive to me but I would rather just pure Perl as I know the syntax and have had the parser flat out break without good error reporting on some .yml trial files of mine.

Carter's compass: I know I'm on the right track when by deleting something, I'm adding functionality.