[sf-perl] Code Question

[Brian Hamlin]

Hello Perl Veterans

I have a question about DBI, Files and some XML. Useful References 
appreciated.

I wrote a functional DBI program that just reads data on request, 
invoked as a cgi, for light weight use. That works fine. The data is 
returned as an XML structure that I write out manually using print.

Now, I want to do something more elaborate-

* read data from an external source (thats working, its a Salesforce 
SOAP query)
    comes back as XML, I use Soap::Lite
* Geocode the addresses in the table, add the results to the XML 
structure
     thats working already in an individual script, LWP get
* take a list of numbers in one field and make a separate "many to 
many" table out of them
* take the rest of the data and make a table out of it
     meaning, write SQL statements manually I suppose. I have that 
working in individual scripts
     a lot of things I have looked at look like more work to get started 
that it is to do this by hand
     I have an idiom someone showed me, which works, using a local array 
with Field Names as a template
       to write the SQL statements
* EXPORT the previous data via DBI and write it to a time-stamped text 
file
     eg MerchTBl_26Jun07.sql/xml/whatever
* REPLACE the contents of the table completely with the fresh data
     the client is not going to pay for a custom system, I am only so 
good at this so far

Each step is doable, especially since I have already solved many of the 
unusual cases
manually once. It is really the rote, ordinary things that are new to 
me, and of course, general
good practices, etc. I dont have the DBI cookbook

Code samples etc apropos to this are appreciated. I do read newsgroups 
and books etc, but since
Perl has been around for a while, the volume of such things is very 
large, and for someone getting
their footing its hard to wade through. Hence the question to the list.

thanks in advance
    -Brian