This _is_ a hard problem, but I personally believe that an elegant solution will present itself some day. I've always assumed the solution would be either to generate some parts of the application code from the db schema, or generate the schema from the application code, or both from a common source (like a sql schema with annotations).

There are lots of partial solutions like this (eg the *::Loader modules to read the schema. Solutions like DBIx::DBO2::Fields to set column level contstraints (its in the TODO to read these from the db schema). But I've not seen anything that puts it all together.