Notes:
Our solution was to use the in-memory format supported by AnyData. In our Perl Modules, we would load the data from the SQL tables at compile time, and import them into AnyData. Once that was done we had a DBI database handle that could be used the query a copy of the data.
After that was done, we just needed to update our code to use the new handle created by DBD::AnyData. Our code did not change, but we were no longer querying the database during run-time.