DBI question

I have a program that will run literally for days and days.  It monitors
logs by file tail.  Problem is that I think the DBI is causing problems.
It is constantly connecting and reconnecting to DB2 for every
transaction.

What I would like to do is block the subroutine and check the DBI
connection for being 'valid' still and then if it is not valid,
reconnect, sleep then try again for N times then give up entirely
issuing message to support.

I saw mention of a state variable but this not on the connection.   Any
help to make this work would be appreciated.

Thanks
Ken