Here's a slight revision of what you have written. It has several benefits:

• strict: misspelling variable names can be a bummer.
• DBI->trace. Read the DBI documentation. This is a great debugging tool.
• RaiseError is set in the connect string. You no longer need to test every single DBI statement.
• Took out use DBD::Oracle; DBI will load the correct DBD for you :)

use strict;
use DBI;

# Define sid, user, password, etc. here
my ( $host, $sid, $user, $passwd ) = some_func();
my $dbh = DBI->connect(    "dbi:Oracle:host=$host;sid=$sid", $user, $p
+asswd,
     { RaiseError  => 1,
       AutoCommit  => 0 } ) or die DBI->errstr;

DBI->trace( 2, 'dbi_trace.txt' );

my $name = "guppy";

my $sql_statement = 'SELECT foo FROM table_bar WHERE name = ?';

my $sth = $dbh->prepare( $sql_statement );

# This is where I try to replace the placeholder with $name
$sth->execute( $name );

while( my $aref = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref ) {
    print $aref->[0] ."\n";
}

$sth->finish;
$dbh->commit;
$dbh->disconnect;
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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