Yeah MS SQL is special and doens't like to run multiple statements at once. I have a more general solution to the problem though.

1. Rather than using a globals, I ask a special function for my DB handles. It handles it's own caching which is nice for MS SQL but probably redundant otherwise. If all the handles have $dbh->{Kids} set, then it creates a new handle otherwise it reuses an old one.

2. I try hard to avoid having multiple SQL statements per subroutine. This ensures that there is one call to my special function per statement.

The end result is I have to pay for connecting multple times. However I don't pay too much and my code feels cleaner.