MySQL gone Away

[stew]

Hi
I am trying to run thru a directory of PDF's, read each one in turn into memory and then store them in MySQL

I get thru about 8 or so when I get the following error

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: MySQL server has gone away at insert_pd
+f.pl line 76.
de140202.pdf

My query looks like this

my $sth = $dbh->prepare(q{insert into ee_pdf(id,data) values (?,?)});

I am reading the pdf like this

      open(FILE,"<".$filename) || die ("Could not open FILE");
      @file_arr = <FILE>;
      close(FILE);

      foreach $line(@file_arr) {
      $data .= $line;
      }

And executing the query thus..

$sth->execute($id,$data);

Any idea why this might be?
Stew