If your dev site is a seperate vserver, you can set environment variables to seperate these. In you section of the conf file for your production server, use something like:

SetEnv DB prod_db

And, in the section for the dev environment you can:

SetEnv DB dev_db

Now, in your script, you can grab the DB environment variable to know which DB to connect to.

Why is $dbh global, BTW. Using Apache::DBI?

Cheers,
KM