Singleton Objects for DBI Connection

[asafp]

Hi Monks,

I have a web application running on Apache/mod_perl.
Each request sent to the application opens an Apache child process.
I have written a DBConnection class which connects to Oracle using DBI.
I have implemented the class as a singleton so the same connection is used till the end of the request.

The problem is that it seems that the instance of the class is not dead when the request is done
and the next request does not create a new instance but keeps using the first one.

Does it make sense? Do child processes share objects between them?

Here's my DBConnection class:

package DBConnection;

my $dbm;
#==========#
sub new {
#==========#
    my($class, $name) = @_;        
    my $self = { name => $name };  
    bless($self, $class);          
    return $self;
}

#============#
sub instance
#============#
{
   my ($class)= @_;
   if(not defined $dbm)
   {
        $dbm = new DBConnection();
   }
   return $dbm;
}

#==========================#
sub getSingleConnection 
#==========================#
{
   my ($self) = @_;
   unless($dbm->{dbh})
   {
        $dbm->{dbh} = $self->getConnection();
   }
   return $dbm->{dbh};
}

#==================#
sub getConnection 
#==================#
{
    my ($self) = @_;
    my $dbh;
    eval {
        $dbh = DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:host=dbserver;sid=db_sid;port=
+1521','user','passwrd');
                or return undef;

    };
    warn $@ if $@;
    return undef if $@;
    return $dbh;
}

Thanks,
Asaf