It seems awfully clunky to do it the way I've been doing it (where the first variable passed to any subroutine is the database handler). It works, but this is Perl -- there *must* be a more elegant way of doing it. :)

um, not really :) that is about as elegant as you should get with one variable

If you've got more pass a "hash"

 foo(  dbh => $dbh, roshambo => 'dynamite'} );
...
sub foo {
  my %args = @_;
  $args{dbh}->prepare...;
}
[download]

chromatics free book Modern Perl talks about this (%parameters)

OTOH, there are things like Sub::NamedParams/Params::Named/Method::Signatures...