The original poster was looking for something. I was not looking for something, I was pointing out what is probably the major drawback to the solution you offered and pointing out alternatives and some of the major drawbacks of them.

But, no, none of them work very well, in my experience. It is rather sad that we can't have signals interrupt DBI while just preventing the signal action from bubbling up to the next higher level of abstraction until that level of abstraction is at a safe point for it to be interrupted. Perl's implementation of "safe signals" just never interrupt a long-running DBI call. That should be considered a bug to be fixed (without having to resort to "unsafe signals").