in reply to Perl, DBI, Oracle, Apache: Followup

You are using shell syntax in your environment variable setup - I'm not sure if Apache will do what you want. The following lines are likely problematic:

SetEnv NLS_LANG `$ORACLE_HOME/bin/nls_lang.sh` SetEnv PATH $ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

You should really output the %ENV you get, and possibly hardcode the values instead of creating them dynamically.