Data::Peek is a bit like Data::Dumper, just offering a bit more direct entries to perl's internal debugging functions. I wrote it, so it is effectively a shameless plug. However, I also use it very very often, and it has turned out to be my fav debugging tool. As some symbols needed to get the complete set of features might not be available on ActivePerl (due to linking differences on Windows), that might be why ActiveState does not include it in their binary ppm packages.

The bind_columns example (third code snippet) is almost literally part of the DBI documentation. It is not selecting columns to print, but setting the destination for the fetched fields.