A long time ago, brothers, I wrote a script and I didn't know what I was doing. It's grown big. I don't know much more now but I do know I should convert it to 'use strict' so I am. And a right PITA it has been (apologies for swearing in a temple). I'm almost there but one question remains. The script uses:

require DBI;
require DBD::mysql;
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And here there and everywhere, there are statements like:

$statement = ....
$sth = $dbh->prepare($statement) 
$rv = $sth->execute 
@info = $sth->fetchrow_array;    
$rc = $sth->finish;
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I've converted these to have 'my' in front of each instance - I figured this was better practice than a single my ($statement,$sth,$rv,$rc) at the top of each perl file to cover all the subfunctions (I'm sure you'll tell me if I'm wrong). Anyway, previously, I connected to the database at the top:

our $database;
$dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:$database");
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and then disconnected at the very end.

$dbh->disconnect;
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And multiple database calls happened using this single connection.

Now that I'm converting to 'use strict', each subfunction is naturally enough forcing me to declare the $dbh within it. So I presume my options are:
1. declare $dbh as a global variable, use 'our' within the subfunctions and carry on with a single connection.
2. connect and disconnect to the database for each separate database query.

So my 'elegance' genie is telling me that I shouldn't use 'our' unless necessary so should go for 2. But my 'performance' genie is telling me that it's going to make everything take longer if I connect and disconnect over and over so I should opt for 1. Please oh fellow bowl carriers, your collective wisdom would be appreciated especially if you know of a magical option 3 which is the correct path for the righteous...