I am not quite sure about your Third point. If the DB connect fails, this code will DIE. The idea of an eval{} block was not under consideration here. The OP was asking some very basic questions and I tried (perhaps not successfully) to give a simple "roadmap".

Well, once I start bean-counting, it's hard to stop. ;-)

C:\Users\alex>perl -Mstrict -w -E "sub false { 0 } my $x=false or die 
+'Died'; say 'not reached';"
Died at -e line 1.
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$x will never be assigned, because perl dies before it could assign the result of the or operation. That's what happens in your code, and I could have stopped here.

BUT, in beancounting mode, there may be an eval around the assignment, not shown in the posting. Yes, this is beyond basic use of perl.

C:\Users\alex>perl -MWin32 -E "sub false { 0 } eval { my $x=false or d
+ie 'Died'; say 'not reached'; 1 } or Win32::MsgBox(qq[$@]);"
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That example aborts, but the last thing it does before is to display a message box contaning "Died at -e line 1.". That does not make much sense when hacking a one-liner in a console window. But it becomes really useful when perl is started by something like a self-extracting archive or simply a non-console application. Without that messagebox, you would just see a console window flashing into existance and disappear again, and you had no chance to see a useful error message. I used that trick almost two decades ago, see Re^3: How do you distribute your Perl application to your customers?.

C:\Users\alex>perl -Mstrict -w -E "BEGIN { *CORE::GLOBAL::die=sub { 'I
+ am evil' } } sub false { 0 } my $x=false or die 'Died'; say 'not rea
+ched';"
not reached
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And that silly example demonstrates that one can redefine die so it does not die. Just to make people really, really angry.

A little extra:

Quick, don't think, just answer for yourself: What does that example print out?

C:\Users\alex>perl -Mstrict -w -E "BEGIN { *CORE::GLOBAL::die=sub { 'I
+ am evil' } } sub false { 0 } my $x=false or die 'Died'; say 'not rea
+ched, $x=',$x;"
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not reached, $x=0
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Alexander