You are preparing the same statement over and over. Use placeholders instead.

If you pass DBI the RaiseError flag on connecting, you can avoid checking the success of each DBI operation manually.

You also read the entire file into an array, then process it element by element. Read as you go instead.

While we're at it, don't open the file yourself at all. Using the diamond operator to read from the files in @ARGV will handle errors automatically and lets you handle multiple files at no extract cost.

There's also no provision in your script to pass the connection parameters in from the outside, so you have to change the source for every database it is supposed to run against. Look into Getopt::Long.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DBI;
use Text::CSV;
use Getopt::Long;

use constant USAGE => "usage: $0 [ -h hostname ] [ -p port ] --db dbna
+me -u user -p passwd -t table file.csv [ file.csv ... ]";

GetOptions(
    'h|host=s'  => \( my $opt_host = "localhost" ),
    'p|port=i'  => \( my $opt_port = "3306" ),
    'db=s'      => \( my $opt_dbname ),
    'u|user=s'  => \( my $opt_user ),
    'p|pass=s'  => \( my $opt_pass ),
    't|table=s' => \( my $opt_table ),
) or die USAGE;

die USAGE
    if not( $opt_dbname and $opt_user and $opt_pass and $opt_table );

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
    "dbi:mysql:dbname=$opt_dbname;host=$opt_host;port=$opt_port",
    $opt_user,
    $opt_pass,
    { RaiseError => 1, PrintError => 0 }
) or die "Connection error: $DBI::errstr";

my $csv = Text::CSV->new();

my $sth = do {
    $csv->parse( scalar <> ); # first line
    my @field = $csv->fields();
    my $sql =
        "INSERT INTO $opt_table ("
        . join( ',', @field )
        . ") VALUES ("
        . join( ',', ( '?' ) x @field )
        . ")";
    print STDERR "Using query: $sql\n";
    $dbh->prepare( $sql );
};

# # broken
# while( <> ) {
#    $csv->parse( $_ ) or next;
#    $sth->execute( $csv->fields );
# }

my ( $buff, $lnr );

while( <> ) {
   $buff .= $_;
   if( $csv->parse( $buff ) ) {
       $sth->execute( $csv->fields );
       $buff = '';
       $lnr = $. + 1;
   }
}

die "Error on line $lnr\n" if length $buff;
[download]

Untested.

Update: fixed code as per tilly's example.

Makeshifts last the longest.

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