You've reached the same conclusion I came to with the same problem. I had to change my event system in my game Tapestry, when I realized that you can't store coderefs.
But, I'm wondering about something. Are you building the code on the fly? If these jobs are already defined and you just want to store them for easy retrieval couldn't you just make a class with the jobs as methods? then just store the method name in the database, pull it into a variable and call it with Job->$var($args). In fact you could encapsulate the whole process into the object. the constructor retrieves the record from the db and stores the methodname and whatever else is stored, then a run method that calls the appropriate method. i.e.:

       Job->new(id=>3434)->run();
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Of course if the jobs are built on the fly then you are better off storing the subs.

-pete
Entropy is not what is used to be.