running dbaccess via perl

I have a perl script which will be doing many selects and inserts to an Informix database at various times in the script. I would prefer to use DBI and DBD::Informix but we have been unable to compile it on AIX. The only other solution workable I could come up with was to run dbaccess using IPC::Open3 so that I could keep dbaccess-specific STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR filehandles open during the entire time the script is running. (Running dbaccess for each transaction would add an unacceptable amount of processing time.) What concerns me is the potential for deadlock and the fact that there might be some as-yet-unknown condition that would cause the script to never exit the while loops that read the stdout and stderr filehandles. So while I have a working script, I am not entirely comfortable with this approach and was wondering if anyone knows either where I can get an already compiled version of DBD::Informix (for AIX 4.2 and higher) or can suggest another solution. Thanks.