Yes. I am familiar with placeholders, but deliberately left them out of this SOPW pursuant to the "barebones" inquiry. Given that the DBI presents abstractions and conveniences that may overlap, supercede and perhaps even run counter-intuitive to the idioms of the underlying database system (in this case sqlite), it seemed like the reductionist approach was the best way to pose this question.

The side note is, however, appreciated because I think it (and the other posts in this thread) help illuminate how "sqlite" should be considered qualitatively different from "sqlite + DBI"