You probably don't want your objects creating the dbh handles for you. This doesn't scale and is not portable; you have to edit your perl modules if you change your database or use on a different server.

What if you already have the database connection open in your code? Do you want your objects to open a new connection per object?

But creating a $self->{dbh} is probably a good idea. I would do something like:

my $person = People->new(dbh => $dbh, %other_data);
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