Don't think this can be done with standard DBI. Every substitution gets quoted so if you use $var = join',', @ids; and execute with this $var, you'll get ... where id in ('1,2,3,4') and the query will obviously fail. Can't trick DBI by setting the { TYPE => SQL_INTEGER } attribute since it'll recognize it as a string and quote it anyway (and complain about the error).

As an alternative, DBIx-Simple has a "??" placeholder which is replaced with a list of as many question marks as values. Btw, I've only started looking at this module and haven't checked the speed in production.

So, for example, your code fragment might look like:

my @ids = (1,2,3,4);
my $query = 'select * from a_table where id in (??)';
my $result = $dbh->query($q, @ids);
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The prepare is taken care of internally and rows can be fetched in various ways.