Given a pooling mechanism, my inclination is to let each bit of code that needs a DB handle just grab it from the pool (and you can simplify this by creating a connector that just returns a connection for you, instead of having to manually call DBI->connect all the time). The one exception to this model would be if you have a backend that supports transactions1, so that the session associated with a given handle really matters, in which case, of course the thing to do is simply pass the handle around as you would any other object, as has already been pointed out.
1 I suppose it might also apply if your DBMS has something equivalent to MySQL's last_insert_id, as that may be session-and-thus-connection-dependent as well.
If not P, what? Q maybe?
"Sidney Morgenbesser"
