Try simplifying the statements the hash is passing by doing something super simple like, "SELECT NOW()" and see if that works. I would also add a debugging line just about the prepare call and print out the statement (just to make sure everything looks ok). It looks like that is where your problem is, for prepare to die with that error is weird. Although, I have never used the ODBC driver with DBI but I've never seen that error with the MySQL driver.