Actually- I was only concerned that you cant ask the same handle to prepare a statement while iterating through a previously prepared statement. But after testing it, my assumption was wrong. In the subquery below, I delete data from the original query. And DBI handles it OK. --Me.

sub runSomeQueries
{
    my $query = "select LocationID, LocationName from Location";
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
    if ( $sth->execute() )
    {
        while (my $data = $sth->fetchrow_hashref )
        {
            runSomeSubQueries($$data{LocationID});
        }
    }
}


sub runSomeSubQueries
{
    my $locationID = shift;
    my $query = "Delete from Location where LocationID = ?";
    my $sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
    $sth->execute($locationID);
}
[download]

So- back to your question, passing the handle. Aside from the points raised by above. If you code your functions to accept a handle, you can pass differently configured handles through to your function.

• you can hit different databases

  my $dbh_primary = DBI->connect(XXXX);
  my $dbh_backup = DBI->connect(YYYY);
  runSomeQueries($dbh_primary);
  runSomeQueries($dbh_backup);
  [download]

• you can pass in a handle with AutoCommit turned off

  my $dbh = DBI->connect(XXXX);
  my $dbh_tx = DBI->connect(XXXX, AutoCommit => 0);
  
  #  non-transactioned
  runSomeQueries($dbh);
  runSomeSubQueries($dbh);
  
  #  if you need to transaction a bunch of queries together
  runSomeQueries($dbh_tx);
  runSomeSubQueries($dbh_tx);
  if ( $OK )
  {
      $dbh->commit();
  }
  else
  {
      $dbh->rollback();
  }
  [download]

-HTH