Thanks for both of these responses! Both of them mention concerns that I've already thought about. None of them seem to be a problem.. Yet! 8) We'll see once I actually have the code soldered.

My initial code sample is actually incorrect. It would've been more appropriatly written:

#!/app/perl5.005/bin/perl

package First;
sub new { bless {}, 'First' };
sub test {
  my $self=shift;
  bless $self, 'Second';

  $self->test;
}
1;

package Second;
sub test {
  my $self=shift;
  print "Hello World!\n";
}
1;

package main;

my $t=new First();

print $t,"\n";  # Output: First=HASH(0x2864)
$t->test or die $t->error;
print $t,"\n";  # Output: Second=HASH(0xc2864)
[download]

I'm shielding the caller from having to try the different approaches manually. (Notice the fail over moved into First::test from main::. Also added a test on the return of the main:: call to test.) The fail-over "rules" will be determined by the failure type. an ORA-00001 (Unique constraint violation) may execute a new class that scrubs the data, then re-tries the First class again. (Ok.. I'd probably just make that a conditional and "truncate" the table ;) or throw the row to an exceptions table)

If the table to be loaded fails over to another approach, it will be logged and the configuration file can be updated to reflect which load process worked best. Bypassing First altogether when you know it's gonna fail.

Again, thanks for the responses.. The two links mentioned are really cool! (Both of them sound fairly close to my situation) Now it's off to code!