A sidenote... I've had troubles in the past running DBD::mysql , one platform would work, one would not. I was under the impression, that it was a DBI or DBD::mysql problem- so I checked versions against each other on those systems and against cpan.

What was freaking going on.. is that my mysqld / mysql-devel versions were varied. I would get DBI errors for sql queries on one machine and not another. I wasn't realizing that I was really getting errors from two different mysqld database servers.