cgi and perl database interaction

Hello,
I have a website that uses a php engine for news generation and, 
basically, most of the other pages. It uses a MySQL database to store 
the majority of the page contents (i.e. news).

However, I've written before that I've started using simple CGI scripts 
in Perl to make some activities automatic (i.e. statistics updates, 
standings updates - it's a sports-related website :) ).

At first, I used the Storable module and kept all the data in flat files 
but it generally is not the best solution so I moved to DBI.

Now, the thing is that the PHP scripts also connect to the database and, 
presumably, uphold the connection over the duration of the session so as 
not to disconnect and reconnect continually when the user browses the 
website.

My question is - is it possible to do the same thing with those CGI 
scripts? At the moment, each script 'requires' a module where a function 
is defined which returns a database handle upon connecting to the 
database. This is not an efficient solution and I would like to change 
that. There is no mod_perl running on the server but maybe there is a 
way to keep the connection via some Apache mechanisms. I'm not 
experienced with the server operation that much so forgive me if what I 
wrote is hogwash ;)
Cheers,
Pawl