Sorry, that was a copy/paste from the mailing list. You can just call DBI->connect_cached(), but you have to set some other things that are described on the mailing list. That's the best place to look for this info.

However, I think you're making it too hard. The only thing wrong with what you have is that you are passing data around by serializing it and sticking it in %ENV. Why not just make your $cfg object available from other classes? Stash it in a global and then make a simple accessor like MyCfg::get_cfg() that MyCDBI can call to get it.