I am new to Perl and DBI too, I installed Perl 5.8 on my PC , SQL Server 2000 is it possible to installed DBI on Windows and use in Perl to connect to SQL Server ?

I assume you mean MS SQL Server?

Yes it is possible.
But you need a C compiler.

As far as I know, it is not possible to access SQL Server with the Sybase client libraries (once it was, that changed with version 7.0).
So you have to use FreeTDS, a free implementation of the TDS protocol, used to talk to SQL Server.
Get it at www.freetds.org.

You may get DBI from activestate (www.activestate.com) for version 5.8.
If not, go to CPAN and search for DBI (search.cpan.org).

You also need DBD::Sybase, and that's not on activestate at the moment. So you have to compile this on your own.
Go to Michael Pepplers site for this: www.mbay.net/~mpeppler/

I use the Win32::ODBC interface all of the time. The DBD::ODBC interface works nicely too, but it isn't "blessed" for production use in our shop.

-PatP

I know of a "shop" like that :o --- they would rather be unable to solve the problem than use a method that hasn't been "blessed!" :eek:

You gotta love that... Or at least it helps if you can pretend like you do.

-PatP