The perl database independent interface - dbi - does not take much advantage of perl's context sensitivity. this is the situation where a perl subroutine knows whether the caller wants a single scalar value or a list of them to be returned.

dbix::contextualfetch is a sub-class of dbi which redefines some of the various fetch methods to fix this oversight. it also adds a few new methods for convenience (though not necessarily efficiency). much of this code was originally part of the ima::dbi perl module (libima-dbi-perl package).