When I have done this type of task, I've broken it up into several discrete portions and stitched them together using a shell script. Right now, I have a daily load from a sub-optimally normalized Oracle database into a MySQL database (for generating reports). I use the following process:

1. Oracle's SQL*Plus connections kicked off from command-line to generate tab-delimited data files
2. A cleanup step to make sure all backslashes are backslashes, there's a \N for empty datafields, and the like. This a shell script that calls Perl in commandline.
3. MySQL's client is kicked off in batch mode. I have to do some massaging of the data, as well, so I need to use MySQL.

While all of those things could've been done in Perl, it's a lot quicker to do it in the native client. And, the reason I wrote the second step as a shell script around commandlines is that it's easier to do

#!/bin/sh

foreach f in *.xsv
loop
    perl -pi -e 's/asdf/jkl;/g' $f
endloop
[download]

than it is for me to open the file, loop through all the lines, and write the file back out. Why make it harder for yourself?

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