Thanks for the solution.. I really failed to consider the fact that Class::DBI allows you to add your own methods, but I was really hoping that the relationships could be setup programatically through the interface and have everything work together very nicely. The lack of multiple column foreign keys really smacks me as a shortcoming, as it's an idiom I use pretty frequently.

I'm not sure what you mean about the two-thirds many-to-many mapping. I'm writing this database for a store of sorts, as a way to help them track inventory and other items of interest. The idea of the baseitems table is that it tracks the basic item information, it's name, weight, supplier and wholesale price. The items table turns the baseitems into "packages" of items, so to speak.

So, you have an item in the baseitems table like a "#5 bolt" and all it's information, then you have a retail package in the items table like "package of 10 #5 bolts" or "package of 50 #5 bolts" that contains pricing and and unit count information.

So, each baseitem relates to several members in the item table, and each member of the item table relates back to exactly one baseitem.