I cordially recommend that you put the sysadmin’s advice to tough, objective, fact-finding scrutiny before taking any action.   You need to get to the bottom of exactly why “ODBC is failing in the application.”   You are contemplating a massively pervasive change to this application which might be tantamount to a complete rewrite.   (In any case it will, to some degree, de-stabilize everything that is now there.)   If the “last mile” to the database consists of ODBC, and if the root cause of the problem is (as I frankly suspect...) not a flaw in the Perl code, then no amount of Perl wrapping or re-wrapping will address the core issue, which undoubtedly will remain.   Get yourself to a point where you have a test case that proves the existence of the problem, and another one which proves that your contemplated solution will solve it.