A useful addition to this might be to stash the returned db handle.

If you're running Apache then then you can do something like the following to share a single connection amongst several scripts:

if (! $Global::var{'dbh'}) {

    my $sdn  = "DBI:mysql:database=$db;host=$host";
    my $dbh  = DBI->connect($sdn, $user, $pass) || die ("Unable to con
+nect to DB: $DBI::errstr");
    $Global::var{'dbh'} = $dbh;
}
return ($Global::var{'dbh'});
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