What about creating a statement handle on the statement using prepare? Couldn't you check DBI::errstr on a prepare to determine if the statement was valid?

Maybe something like this simple example ...

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use DBI;
require '/up/web/standard.pl';

my $dbh = db_connect_local(); # my home-grown connection routine
my $statement = 'select blah from my_table'; # blah is not a valid col
+umn on that table.

my $sth = $dbh->prepare($statement);
unless ($sth) { 
  print "Error: $DBI::errstr\n";
}
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Update: It seems this does not work for MySQL, but it does work under DBD::Oracle. Thanks to erix and tye for pointing that out.