Well, there's the usual part about use strict. If you are using strict, then you're declaring these variables outside of your subroutine. From the way you have the last two lines of the subroutine, it appears to me that you are setting global variables and having other subs rely on them. This is difficult because it can be a problem telling where a variable is initialized, changed, or reused.

I can't tell from your code where the problem is (am I missing something simple?), but you can simplify some stuff:

$sth = $dbh->prepare("DELETE FROM $holding_table WHERE year=? AND
month=? AND day=? AND time_start=? AND time_end=? AND title=?");
$sth->bind_param(1, "$key[1]");
$sth->bind_param(2, "$key[2]");
$sth->bind_param(3, "$key[3]");
$sth->bind_param(4, "$key[4]");
$sth->bind_param(5, "$key[5]");
$sth->bind_param(6, "$key[6]");
$sth->execute();
[download]

That can become:

$sth = $dbh->prepare("DELETE FROM $holding_table WHERE year=? AND
month=? AND day=? AND time_start=? AND time_end=? AND title=?");
$sth->execute( @key );
[download]

Questions:

• Do you set the RaiseError flag when you instantiate the DBI object?
• Are you sure that your values from the split are correct? You're splitting on a comma and an extra comma could make life difficult.
• Have you tried printing out all of the @key values and creating the SQL by hand? If even one of your values does not match a value in the database, the SQL will fail.

Cheers,
Ovid

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