Updating lots of database fields in a single row

[Andrew Beverley]

I've not been developing with Perl for long, so I'd like to know if
there is a better way of writing the following database query (or is
there a better place to ask?):


my @fields = qw(field1 field2 field3 field4 field5 field6 field7 ... );
my @updates;
foreach my $field (@fields)
{
    push @updates, "$field = '$hash->{$field}'" if $hash->{$field};
}
my $values = join ',', @updates;
my $sth = $self->dbh->prepare("UPDATE table SET $values WHERE id = ?");
$sth->execute($opdefs_id);


Basically, I'd like to update lots of fields in a single database row.
Obviously I could write out each updated field individually, but I
wondered whether the above is considered tidier, or whether there is a
better way altogether? The problem with the above code is that I'm not
using placeholders and bind values (which I assume is to be preferred)
so I'll also need to escape values as required.

Thanks,

Andy