<p>I am developing on a LAMP(erl) stack and know of several ways to store obscured passwords.  I'd like to hear from those who feel they have a best practice, given MySQL 4.1.1 and Perl 5.8, and the reasons why it's the best.</p>

<p>One option I have read about, using the MySQL ENCODE() and DECODE() functions, sounds pretty good to me... your thoughts?</p>

Well, since there's a
```
DECODE()
```
function, I'd say no, for the simple fact that you probably want to store the password in hashed form, to prevent anyone obtaining your database/password file from casually reading passwords.
I'd recommend going with the classic salted hash method.