I have a hunch you have your dbi connect string in an array and you're passing it to DBI. I have to guess because you didn't provide any code (which would definitely help).

Note that there's a difference between $ar and @ar below.

my @ar = (1..3);
my $ar = \@ar;
print "@ar | $ar \n";
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Most likely you just have to do something like DBI->connect(@$arguments) to turn your arrayref into an array.