perl module variable scope question

[P. R.M.]

I'm using the perl module to handle the backend logic between freeradius & a mysql database.

  *   The first step in the authentication/authorization process is to have perl query the database for a given username.
  *   Perl then queries the DB and returns the cleartext password if the username is found & is valid.
  *   next, the cleartext password is handed off to the CHAP module for verification
  *   afterwards, control goes back to the perl module (in post-auth section), when it runs another query in order to pull the reply attributes for the given user

I'd like to avoid running the 2nd query in post-auth, and simply run a single query that returns all of the reply attributes if the username is valid. The problem is that the perl module has to exit its context & return control back to the CHAP module in order to verify the password.

I don't want to prematurely set the reply attributes in the 'authorize' section if the user will subsequently be rejected due to a bad password. So, I need a way to save&pass the results of the initial query (w/ the attributes data) from the 'authorize' function to the 'post_auth' function. Global variables don't seem like they would be a good idea (not sure how this would work in terms of concurrency/thread safety).  Any ideas on how to persist data from one perl module function call to the next?

The only other option I considered was having the perl module do the CHAP/PAP authentication, but I would much rather leave this task to freeradius.

Please help, thanks