Your current practise is exactly what is recommended and for just the reasons you give.

There is no need to worry about any 'overhead' issues in passing the db handle around - it is a scalar reference to a blessed object so all you are really passing around is essentially the address of the 'real' object.

Depending on context, in a situation where I have a number of related variables I'm inclined to use a light weight object. Consider:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %stuff = (
    this => 'this important parameter',
    that => 'that important parameter',
    dbh  => 'the all important database handle',
);

my $obj = bless \%stuff;

$obj->DoThis ('params', 'as', 'required');


sub DoThis {
    my ($self, $params, $as, $required) = @_;

    print "$self->{this} and $self->{that} and $params $as $required\n
+";
}
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