I have a program that uses a database. In it, I have a simple function to get a connection to the database.

sub dbh {
    my ($u,$p) = ('user',':)');
    my $dbh = DBI->connect(
        "dbi:Sybase:server=sql.example.com",
        $u, $p, { RaiseError => 1 },
    );
    $dbh->do( $initial_stuff );

    $L->debug( "made new database connection $dbh" );

    return $dbh;
}
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That works fine. It would be easy enough to write something that caches that using a state variable.

sub dbh {
    state $dbh;

    if ( ! defined $dbh ) {
        # blah blah bah
    }
    return $dbh;
}
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That way I don't open up a new connection every time I need to talk to the database. Unfortunately, that will get tripped up when I fork.