Ya, I kind of agree on the >1 DB connections not allowed. It (perl/DBI) does allow for >1 active DB handles (objects). But of course those handles/objects have different names and that's how to work with the different ones (not a DB prefix like what I have). Still, it accepted the name in the syntax if it didn't have a ".". I kinda liked the db prefix because I'm doing these sweeping deletes and I wanted to make extra-sure that I was deleting from the correct DB.
I'm going to ask them to just create another DB without the "." in the name. All the code has the prefix and I don't want to uproot that (because it's working).
I tried encapsulating the DB name in double quotes (no good)
This is what the documentation says you are supposed to do for non-simple identifiers so you need to show your work to understand where you went wrong.
Actually, you really aren't supposed to put the database name in there at all; it's pointless since there is no ability to reference a database other than the one you are connected to.