The reason i did this is the following:

   use strict;
   use DBH qw(&DBHOBJ);
   my $sth = DBHOBJ()->prepare('select blah from table;');
    $sth->execute();
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Now the 'OLD' DBH just used Apche::DBI to return $self->{dbh};
However, the MySQL server sometimes? coused the error "MySQL server has run away'.
It was not able to reconnect, and the Apache::DBI module returned 1 on the implemented ping-method.