This is an SQL to OO mapper with an object API inspired by Class::DBI (and a compatibility layer as a springboard for porting) and a resultset API that allows abstract encapsulation of database operations. It aims to make representing queries in your code as perl-ish as possible while still providing access to as many of the capabilities of the database as possible, including retrieving related records from multiple tables in a single query, JOIN, LEFT JOIN, COUNT, DISTINCT, GROUP BY and HAVING support.

DBIx::Class can handle multi-column primary and foreign keys, complex queries and database-level paging, and does its best to only query the database in order to return something you've directly asked for. If a resultset is used as an iterator it only fetches rows off the statement handle as requested in order to minimise memory usage. It has auto-increment support for SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 and is known to be used in production on at least the first four, and is fork- and thread-safe out of the box (although your DBD may not be).