The Perl DBI is a very nicely done and well thought out database interface: I know of no language that does this better.

However, database engines are curious and mutually incompatible beasties, and you do need to know a couple of tricks when dealing with them. It is my intent to post such things here:

• Retrieving procedure return values (sql procedure call howto):
  • Oracle and DB2 [example]
  • Sybase [example]
• DBI Shells:
  • dbishell
  • PIQT
  • dbish ( comes with the DBI: see the man page )