apparently I was very wrong... any problems I had previously were simply a result of my own insuffiencies. I had always assumed this to be the case, but I mentioned my problems because the only solution I came to when I couldn't get placeholders to work was to take them out and thought the original poster might come to a similar place.

The problems I was referring to were with using DBI and the ODBC DBD to perform UPDATE statements on MS Access DBs using placeholders. I just wrote up a test statement, though, and had no problems. Sorry to pass bogus information, perhaps this code can help the original poster anyway...

my @updates = map {$dbh->quote_identifier($_) . ' = (?)'} ('call 1 com
+ment', 'call 2 comment', 'call 3 comment', 'call 4 comment');
my $name_field = $dbh->quote_identifier('last name');
my $update_string = join ", ", @updates;

my $sql = qq{UPDATE $table SET $update_string WHERE $name_field = (?)}
+;
print "$sql\n";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare_cached($sql);
$sth->execute('foo','bar','baz','qux','smith');
[download]

I was thoroughly wrong, but maybe the code will end up helping where my previous post couldn't :)
--au