I threw together the following little benchmark in order to get some numbers on DBD::ODBC peroformance, which is just what I'm working with. I'm running both server and client on a PIII 500 PC with 128 MB of RAM, IDE hard drive, NT Server 4.0 and MSSQL 7.0. No optimization or tunning whatsoever. I would say this numbers are close to the minimum you could expect from a similar system. Performance aside I'd reccommend DBD::ODBC for maximum portability. I would also because I didn't have any problems installing it and it has behaved exactly as expected during development.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use DBI;
my $dbh;

my $time = time;
for(1..999) {
  $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:ODBC:sqlkranon', 'sa', '') || die $dbh->err
+str;
  $dbh->disconnect;
}

$dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:ODBC:sqlkranon', 'sa', '') || die $dbh->errst
+r;

print "1000 connects in ", time - $time, " seconds\n";

$time = time;
my $rows;
for(1..10000) {
  my $sth = $dbh->prepare("select CveAsegSeguro,CveSeguro from C_Asegu
+radorasSeguros");

  $sth->execute();
  while (my @row = $sth->fetchrow_array ) {
    $rows++;
  }
}
$dbh->disconnect;

print "10000 selects fetching $rows rows in ", time - $time, " seconds
+\n";

__END__

Results:

1000 connects in 15 seconds
10000 selects fetching 30000 rows in 17 seconds
[download]

Good luck!

Brother Greg