If you're of an object-oriented attitude then I'd take a look at Class::DBI, which allows you to quickly create an object based interface to tables. I find it very useful and a huge timesaver.
As for the "no. of tries" problem - having 5 tables, one for each try, probably isn't the best solution (what happens when somebody decides you need 4 or 6 tries? what happens when you need to add a little bit more info on each try?)
Instead have a table with a primary key of "jobid" & "try number" so you would have something like this:
jobid try server stunit ... etc ...
1 1 foo bar
1 2 fribble baz
2 1 feep babble
... and so on ...
This way you're only ever messing with a single table. Makes your code (and future maintainence) much easier.