Deletes with placeholders are possible with prepare/execute and do ways.

Like talexb said, you should get the error message from the driver, and with that you could get a better hint on what went wrong.

my $qry = "delete from my_table where id=?";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($qry);
$sth->execute($value_to_delete) or die DBI->errstr;
print "deleted rows = ".$sth->rows;
$sth->finish;
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To do the same but using bind values with the do method you can

my $qry = "delete from my_table where id=?";
$dbh->do($qry, undef, $value_to_delete);
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