It's a wrapper. I'm updating and putting in a POD now. I'm also going to add an example of when this fails -- it seems mySQL clients < 4.00 are thread safe.

Update: Thanks gmax for pointing out why DBD::mysql clients can't fork for mysql version 4+, this node. For what it's worth, code to replicate this problem can be used here:

#! /usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use DBI;

my $conn = DBI->connect("DBI:mysql:database=db;host=localhost;", "user
+",
 "password");
my $pid = fork;
die ("No more resources") unless (defined $pid);
my $query = "SELECT * FROM table";
my $result = $conn->prepare($query)
  or die ("Cannot prepare query. $!");
$result->execute
  or die ("Cannot execute query. $!");
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