I got an email back from Paul Marquess:

Hi Dave,

your analysis is 100% correct. The use of the CurrentDB global is the problem. Thankfully, it is fairly straightforward for me to fix this - I just need to find a free evening to make the change.

Finally, I don't know if you've heard, but voting is taking place right now on the creation of a new Usenet group called comp.databases.berkeley-db. Its remit is to discuss all things to do with Berkeley DB, including, but by no means exclusively, the Perl interface.

I think this newsgroup would be of real use to the Perl community. Although I don't mind getting mail directly about my Perl modules, I don't always have the time to respond as quickly as I would like. This new newsgroup would help fill that gap.

If you are interested in the creation of this new group, please read the CFV that was posted to news.announce.newgroups and follow the instructions listed there to reply. You can access the article via your favourite news reader or via the following URL:

http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?&selm=1054606314.6246%40isc.org

Update: BerkeleyDB 0.23 has just been released, with a fix for the reported bug.