That's a good point and it's not the first time that it has been made. In fact, the very article you see on perl.com was rejected at The Perl Journal with the major complaint being I didn't need to spend time slamming DBI, but could instead just show how great Recordset was and attract interest that way.

Your point is now taken, but please understand: when I used that crufty example, my intent was not: "oh boy let me come up with some super-crappy DBI code and scare everyone off from it." In fact, until I read this thread, it never occurred to me that that would be the way that people would take that example.

That example came about simply because I had to fix something and it was right there staring me in the face. And then I began to think: "if only Recordset were the de facto application-level interface, things like this could not be written." And then things continued from there. I kept writing and piecing together ideas until it turned into an article.