sub dbAction is prototyped to take a reference to an array; but you call it with an array (not a reference).

Actually,  dbAction() is prototyped to take a single explicit array (i.e., something with a  @ sigil) as an argument and pass a reference to the array to the function. It will refuse to take an array reference, which is a scalar – won't even compile.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Data::Dump;
 ;;
 sub S (\@) {
   my ($array_ref) = @_;
   dd $array_ref;
   }
 ;;
 my @ra = (qw(foo bar baz), [ 1, 2, 3 ]);
 S(@ra);
"
["foo", "bar", "baz", [1, 2, 3]]
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