The SQL::Statement module implements a pure Perl SQL parsing and execution engine. While it by no means implements full ANSI standard, it does support many features including column and table aliases, built-in and user-defined functions, implicit and explicit joins, complexly nested search conditions, and other features. SQL::Statement is a small embeddable Database Management System (DBMS), this means that it provides all of the services of a simple DBMS except that instead of a persistant storage mechanism, it has two things: 1) an in-memory storage mechanism that allows you to prepare, execute, and fetch from SQL statements using temporary tables and 2) a set of software sockets where any author can plug in any storage mechanism. There are three main uses for SQL::Statement. 1) to access and manipulate data in CSV, XML, and other formats 2) to build a DBD for a new data source 3) to parse and examine the structure of SQL statements.