a bit off topic, i really wish Perl CMSes would stop dropping Postgres support in favour of a MySQL only strategy (Movable Type and WebGUI [Plain Black], this means you). You'd think DBI did not exist or that this was really PHP.
This has nothing to do with either language and everything to do with the projects themselves. Stop dissing languages based on the distant past, especially not when using Perl.
There's really no way to use MySQL without DBI. But at that level, one is still writing db-specific SQL -- perhaps you mean an ORM?