When the DBI has an error, it is available as the string provided by DBI->errstr. So for example in a wild guess at your subroutine below, if the connection fails (no handle returned), the sub returns the DBI->errstr. Of course your calling program would have to do something with that. PrintError=1 causes warning message to be printed, you may or may not want that. RaiseError=1 is a bit stronger and causes a "die", which you don't want unless you inside of a block eval.

You can set RaiseError =1 and put statements in an eval{} which in this context would be Perl's equivalent of a try/catch. In the case of failure, again, calling the errstr method of the DBI will give you its error. 

my $dbh;

sub connectsybase
{
   my ($var1, $var2,...) = @_;

   $dbh = DBI->connect($data_source, $username, $auth,
          {printError => 1} );
   return (DBI->errstr) if (!dbh);    # fail
   return "";                         # success, NULL string
}

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In reply to Re^3: Capturing error thrown by a database by Marshall
in thread Capturing error thrown by a database by puneet.keswani

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