You can do this in many ways. One obvious way is to just wrap this in a function:

    sub database_handle {
        my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:Sybase:CRAP", "sa", "");
        die "connect failed: $DBI::errstr" unless $dbh;
        $dbh;
    }
[download]

Then get a new database handle using

    my $dbh = database_handle();
[download]

Is this what you wanted? Or did you want to save the handle somehow, and return the already-open connection if it's open already? You could do that like this:

    {
        my $dbh;
        sub database_handle {
            return $dbh if defined $dbh;
            $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:Sybase:CRAP", "sa", "");
            die "connect failed: $DBI::errstr" unless $dbh;
            $dbh;
        }
    }
[download]

And you'd get access to the handle the same way, by calling database_handle. This will return an already-open connection.

Or you could get trickier and wrap this in an object wrapper around DBI. This is something I like to do, because I like to write code that works on different databases, so I provide one main class that wraps around DBI, then subclass that to provide database-specific functionality (stuff that differs between DBD drivers, etc.).

Here's a simple class:

    package My::DB;
    use strict;

    sub new {
        my $class = shift;
        $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:Sybase:CRAP", "sa", "");
        die "connect failed: $DBI::errstr" unless $dbh;
        bless { handle => $dbh }, $class;
    }

    sub handle { $_[0]->{handle} }
[download]

You could use this like this:

    my $dbh = My::DB->new->handle;
[download]

This may seem relatively useless (why I am returning an object containing only an open database handle? why not just return the handle itself?), but the way I use this is, I don't actually use any of the DBI methods directly in my main code. I have wrappers around DBI methods that do a bit more, like do some automatic exception handling, bind variable processing, etc.

For example, I have an execute method that does this:

    sub _execute {
        my $self = shift;
        my($sql, $place, $finish) = @_;

        my($sth, $rv);
        eval {
            $sth = $self->prepare($sql);
            $rv = $sth->execute(ref $place eq "ARRAY" ? @$place : ());
            $sth->finish if $finish;
        };
        if ($@) {
            My::Exception::DB->throw(sql => $sql, error => $@);
        }
        return $finish ? $rv : $sth;
    }
[download]

And my prepare method uses prepare_cached, instead of just plain prepare. And so on.

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