First suggestion is to get rid of the "or die" statements, by specifying the raise error option during the dB connect. A little short of time this morning, but the below is some actual working code from a few days ago on an SQLite DB. I use $dbh for the data base handle. You can follow this pattern.

my %attr = ( RaiseError => 1);  #auto die with error printout
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=$dbfilename","","",\%attr)
    or die "Couldn't connect to database $dbfilename: " . DBI->errstr;
    
my $get_qsos = $dbh->prepare ("SELECT * FROM raw_qsos 
                               WHERE 
                               rcv_call = ?");
$get_qsos->execute($call);
my $resultRef = $get_qsos->fetchall_arrayref;
        
my $n_dbQso = scalar(@$resultRef);   #number of rows with that call
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