I always put my disconnect statement at the end of the function/program whenever I'm done with the database completely. I'm not a DBI whiz so that might not be The Right Thing but that's always what I've done.

my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:fenonn:localhost","fenonn","password
+");

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT data1 FROM table1");

$sth->execute() || die "Couldn't execute statement: DBI::errstr; stopp
+ed";

my ( $data ) = $sth->fetchrow_array();

$dbh->disconnect;

print $data;
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