The advantage of SOAP is that the SOAP server is on the database server. The ODBC connection is direct and does not have to worry about network issues. The disadvantage is that you would need to rewrite your application to use SOAP and move the database calls to the application server.

Another option is DBI::Proxy. It is a pure Perl DBI proxy to remote server with its own DBI connection to the database. The big advantage is over SOAP is that the interface is DBI so you wouldn't have to rewrit your application.