As a general principle, you should be able to do anything that the Magento system itself does without writing a single line of SQL. Almost all the Magento data structures use Magento Model classes.
Run the following code somewhere to see what a salesrule/rule model looks like. This assumes you've created a single Shopping Cart Price Rule in the admin with an ID of 1
$coupon = Mage::getModel('salesrule/rule')->load(1);
var_dump($coupon->getData());
Using the dumped data as a guide, we can programatically create a model using the following
$coupon = Mage::getModel('salesrule/rule');
$coupon->setName('test coupon')
->setDescription('this is a description')
->setFromDate('2010-05-09')
->setCouponCode('CODENAME')
->setUsesPerCoupon(1)
->setUsesPerCustomer(1)
->setCustomerGroupIds(array(1)) //an array of customer grou pids
->setIsActive(1)
//serialized conditions. the following examples are empty
->setConditionsSerialized('a:6:{s:4:"type";s:32:"salesrule/rule_condition_combine";s:9:"attribute";N;s:8:"operator";N;s:5:"value";s:1:"1";s:18:"is_value_processed";N;s:10:"aggregator";s:3:"all";}')
->setActionsSerialized('a:6:{s:4:"type";s:40:"salesrule/rule_condition_product_combine";s:9:"attribute";N;s:8:"operator";N;s:5:"value";s:1:"1";s:18:"is_value_processed";N;s:10:"aggregator";s:3:"all";}')
->setStopRulesProcessing(0)
->setIsAdvanced(1)
->setProductIds('')
->setSortOrder(0)
->setSimpleAction('by_percent')
->setDiscountAmount(10)
->setDiscountQty(null)
->setDiscountStep('0')
->setSimpleFreeShipping('0')
->setApplyToShipping('0')
->setIsRss(0)
->setWebsiteIds(array(1));
$coupon->save();
For anyone that's curious, the above is generated code, using the technique discussed here
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