A thousand upvotes upon you, choroba. This at least seems to make it run correctly and consistently... I'm not above doing cringe worthy stuff if it works correctly and consistently. :-)

I fiddled a bit with the same basic idea, and alternatively I can also disconnect and reconnect with a bit of delay like the following prior to each prepare and it seems to work correctly, consistently, and cringe-ly. I had previously seen issues with a lot of connecting/disconnecting, but it hasn't complained yet when I do it like below with @connection = ($dsn, $user, $pass, {InactiveDestroy => 1, PrintError => 0, RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 0}).

$dbh->disconnect or warn "Disconnection failed: $DBI::errstr\n";
sleep(1);
$dbh = DBI->connect_cached(@connection) or die;
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I'll take anything that even remotely resembles a win at this point, like I said in an earlier post on this same basic problem, I seem to be frequently muddling the line between winning and losing.