I've generated a schema from an existing database before, and I agree it's pretty easy. What it came up with was a tree full of files that described every field of every table in the database. I want to avoid that for a couple of reasons.

1. The database I'm working with is old and huge and has been through a lot of bad design. I'd be surprised if the result "just works."
2. The program I have is just one file, and I'd like to keep it that way.
3. The environment I'm in is mostly "not Perl." I'm writing this as a sysadmin outside the support of the developer population, so I can expect future database changes behind my back.

All of the work of my little program is done in one table. I have one SELECT and one UPDATE (each run many times with different parameters), and that's it. I'm not doing a ton of ugly stuff that DBIC would save me.

Anyway, it looks like DBIx::Connector will do what I want, and my quick hack works too. If DBIx::Class can do the job without tangling me up in future work, I'd love to learn how.

As an aside, I'm touched that you remember me after all my absence.