I see several things you could do to improve this code, and possibly fix the problem.

You are passing around 'globals' (as chromatic points out) this just opens you up to a world of trouble. What happens when you forget to my $lexial = $global and then modify it only to see it mess up someplace else. Why not pass it into the sub?

You should also be using placeholders in your sql statement. What if the data has a ' in it? It's not to hard to munge a query string (You can do it with LWP in a oneliner )?

No taint checking (that I can see). -T is not hard to program with if you start in the begining. It's much harder to explain to you boss that someone sent an arbitrary SQL command to the Database and displayed all your customers personal info