I think you're fine as far as passing the ref, but there are a couple of other style points that may bite you later.

• Don't make a habit of calling subs with the &. You're better off doing:

  my $pdb = openDatabase();
  # ...
  doSomething(DB => $pdb, FOO => 'bar');
  [download]

  The reason is that one day you'll forget the parentheses and be surprised at the fact that Perl did not set up @_ separately. (For more details, take a look at perlman:perlsub.)
• Your parenthese make the gist of your code hard to see. You can render the test for the DB parameter more idiomatically: my ($rdb) = $param{DB} || openDatabase();Similarly for your final test (from this snippet, it looks like the test isn't even necessary): $rdb->disconnect() unless $param{DB};

HTH

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