might Alien::Base be useful in DBI or driver development?

I seem to recall a few years ago some discussion about future DBI or driver 
development, and that an ideal would be that one could more easily use the 
typical C client libraries for different DBMSs from Perl without having to write 
any XS necessarily.

Have a look at this:

http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2013/05/alienbase-final-report.html

I think that may be a useful tool to actually realize such an effort, and may be 
a significant improvement to the process of using databases in Perl.  Part of 
the project is about being able to install C dependencies of Perl projects as 
easily as installing a Perl module.

-- Darren Duncan