So sue me for overlooking that. O_o ... (Not that I give a damn about “XP” anyway, but let’s just stay on-topic here.) Your eagle-eyed observation does raise a different point: my understanding is that the presence of this option will prevent the execution of the existing handler-routine in the OP’s example, because (IIRC) it will throw an exception in case of any error. The DBI-call won’t return a non-zero value ... it won’t return anything at all. Instead, the code will die, and I see no error-handling logic (not even a basic eval{}) in it. Which would definitely be a bug of a different sort.