in reply to Sharing database handle
Unless you're very cozy with the database backend (enough so that you can figure out how to do some sort of locking of whatever communications mechanism it's using to talk to its server), you really don't want to do this. This is why things such as Apache::DBI usually set up persistent handles after the child processes have forked.
Check out POE::Component::DBIAgent and POE for another possibility.
As for the second, DBI has a ping method. Check the docs.
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