I'm echoing perrin here - DB access is typically 80-90% of the time to process an HTML request. C::A is actually nicely optimized and is very light. If you're worried about speed, I'd seriously look at CDBI over Tangram - I think it's lighter, which may improve performance somewhat.
In general, if you think something isn't in Perl, try it out, because it usually is. :-)
"What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?"