I would connect using:

my $dbh=DBI->connect($SID, $user, $pass, {RaiseError=>1});
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and avoid typing all the '.. or die' clauses. Because if you get an error, it gives you a place to start looking and if you need to, you can just add a debug 'print' statement before the failing statement on the next go round.

That being said, there should be no reason why your statement can not find fields with spaces in them. My guess is that either the prepare is failing or your bind variable has characters besides spaces that you're not expecting. Maybe you need to convert the bind_variable to hex and print that out to see if there are any weird characters like linefeeds sneaking in. One guy I worked with swore up and down that "placeholders don't work" and he avoided using them, and we found that the input was getting a carriage return character. (He also complained that "arrays don't work" for similar reasons, but that's another story - he would always avoid using things instead of debugging and figuring out what's wrong).

Also, I hope that you don't really have html breaks in the middle of your sql statement because that definitely would cause the prepare to fail.