Thank you for your reply. I'm afraid that you are right: I'll have to implement one connection to Oracle in each child. Anyway I'm not very pleased with this solution: connection to database is expensive both in term of resources and time ... and if my daemon starts having lots of requests I will end up having a lot of database connections ...
Perhaps this is an area where Perl is sort of weak? I don't know, I'm a great fun of Perl :)