I've got Apache::DBI working, and I suppose I need to investigate prepare_cached() further. If you're familiar with prepare_cached, do you know if there are easy ways to deal with expiring stale statements, or do you have to roll-your-own staleness checker? A quick perusal of the docs didn't turn up a whole lot. . .

-Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from doubletalk.

You can use prepare_cached() without fear now. It used to be necessary to call finish() so that you wouldn't get a fatal error if one of your statements was called again before being fully read, but now it's just a warning. Make sure you have the latest DBI and you'll be fine.

Also, use bind_cols() for maximum performance.