Have you looked at what the DBI documentation has to say about the word "connected"?

Also, if the connection to the database fails, I would simply use the RaiseError attribute to find out:

my $retries = 5;
my $dbh;
while( !$dbh and $retries --> 0 ) {
    my $connected = eval {
        $dbh DBI->connect( $dsn, $user, $pass, { RaiseError => 1, Prin
+tError => 0 );
        1
    };
    if( !$connected ) {
        warn "Couldn't connect to $dsn: $@; $retries retries left.";
    } else {
        last;
    };
};
if( $retries == 0 ) {
    die "Couldn't connect to $dsn after five (re)tries";
};
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