Susan Cassidy-3 wrote > Nor can any regular SELECTs in the main program find it.
Ever?
If this is a same transaction visibility issue then when your Perl program stops you should be able to go find that ID manually to confirm it was inserted and committed properly. If you still cannot find the ID then this whole line of exploration (i.e., same session visibility) is pointless since we know beyond doubt committed data is visible to all other sessions.
This would also further support the mistaken object identity theory I proposed up-thread.