A thousand ++'s, perrin. Hadn't thought of the obvious -- have all CDBI classes point at one database (hence they all get the same Ima::DBI handle), then use fully qualified names in the table statement. IT WORKS.

This lets us have our cake and eat it too -- simple txns (mpeppler's comment was right on -- I didn't really like the app-level txn rollback handling trick) and different DBs. Hurrah!

Many many thanks, all