Perl's DBI is a great module to build database applications on, however, when building large complex cross database applications (that have to run on more than one database platform), DBI is not abstract enough to hide the differences between databases. This talk will introduce DBIx::AnyDBD, a module designed specifically for developing cross database applications, originally developed for O'Reilly's WebBoard NNTP server, and now used in O'Reilly's WebBoard for Unix.