Things I Haven't Covered or Shown

• Binding to local variables -- the fastest way to do a select.
• Apache::DBI, automatic connection pooling for Apache.
• Prepared statement caching.
• Large objects (longs, blobs, text, whatever you want to call it).
• The joy of SQLite, the smallest "real" SQL database.
• DBD::Proxy and DBD::ProxyServer -- make DBI distributed.
• Class::DBI -- automatically build OO classes to database tables through DBI.
• Tangram (equal time with Class::DBI!)
• SQL Fairy, (aka SQL::Translator) which makes schema manipulation possible, if not necessarily always easy.
• The various arguments to connect(), including how to throw exceptions rather than having to use errstr().