As a side note, this SQL command gets called several hundred thousand times when run.

At that quantity, it is probably worthwhile to turn your insert into a print, print to a file, and use a bulk loader (or print to a pipe of the bulk loader can handle that). You don't mention what database it is, so I don't know what's available.

And if you stick with inserts, consider using RaiseError, which saves you from checking every DBI call, and you can wrap entire blocks in eval if you need to trap errors and handle them specially.