I never said "don't override it", I even proposed two ways you could do it! This is a general situation: if you want to override method A so that it calls method B, and you know that method B will call method A, you can fix the loop by overriding method B. For example,

    package MyApp::DBI;
    use base 'Class::DBI';
    __PACKAGE__->connection(...);
    1;

    package MyApp::Gallery;
    use base 'MyApp::DBI';
    __PACKAGE__->table('galleries');
    __PACKAGE__->columns(...);

    sub create {
        my ($self, $ops) = @_;

        my $dir = $ops->{'directory'};

        if (-e $dir) {
            die 'directory exists';
        else {
            mkdir $directory;
            $self->find_or_create($data);
        };
       return;
    };

    sub find_or_create {
        my $class    = shift;
        my $hash     = ref $_[0] eq "HASH" ? shift: {@_};
        my ($exists) = $class->search($hash);
        return defined($exists) ? $exists $class->SUPER::create($hash)
+;
    }

    1;
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