OCI Talk

I read through the OCI Talk (from the perl conference?) and followed
up with a skim through _Oracle Call Interface Programmer's Guide_.

Unfortunately I saw that
  1) the coding was generally beyond my experience
     (i.e., I can't code OCI stuff in C)
  2) I couldn't grasp just what it was that OCI enables
      that SQL and Pro*Cobol or DBD::Oracle doesn't

I am guessing Tim's response to the above would be "You needn't
concern yourself with OCI then."... yet I am curious.  Can someone
give me examples of what *practical* benefits are to be gained with
OCI?  What exactly is this "finer control" etc that OCI promises?
I've always found SQL jammed into a procedural language to be quite
fine!

Thanks,
Phil R Lawrence