You're using ASAnywhere rather than Enterprise, with which I'm more familiar. However, I suspect that ASAny has the same limitation as ASEnt in that placeholders can only be used for single-statement batches.

In DBD::Sybase you could work around this by creating a stored procedure that runs your query, and then calling the proc with placeholders (and the appropriate parameters). I don't know if DBD::ASAny supports this.

Otherwise, your current code should work correctly, albeit with direct interpolation which may have certain issues (security, in particular, in case of quoting errors).

Michael