Heh

Perl's DBI offers a last_insert_id Method which works with pretty much all database drivers. So while it is available and in practice works, the interface still has to live with the complete lack of standardisation among DBMS. A quote from the DBI man page:

There are several caveats to be aware of with this method if you want to use it for portable applications:

* For some drivers the value may only available immediately after the insert statement has executed (e.g., mysql, Informix).

* For some drivers the $catalog, $schema, $table, and $field parameters are required, for others they are ignored (e.g., mysql).

* Drivers may return an indeterminate value if no insert has been performed yet.

* For some drivers the value may only be available if placeholders have not been used (e.g., Sybase, MS SQL). In this case the value returned
would be from the last non-placeholder insert statement.

* Some drivers may need driver-specific hints about how to get the value. For example, being told the name of the database 'sequence' object
that holds the value. Any such hints are passed as driver-specific attributes in the \%attr parameter.

* If the underlying database offers nothing better, then some drivers may attempt to implement this method by executing ""select max($field)
from $table"". Drivers using any approach like this should issue a warning if "AutoCommit" is true because it is generally unsafe - another
process may have modified the table between your insert and the select. For situations where you know it is safe, such as when you have
locked the table, you can silence the warning by passing "Warn" => 0 in \%attr.

* If no insert has been performed yet, or the last insert failed, then the value is implementation defined.

Given all the caveats above, it's clear that this method must be used with care.