Although your boss may not desire you use Win32::ODBC for performance reasons, I think that you'll find the performance adequate.

I recently used Perl/ODBC heavily in an NT/Netscape Enterprise/MSSQL 7 environment and was quite pleased with the performance. I also had a direct connect to Oracle on Sun. To the end user, the differences were not noticable.

If you go with ODBC I would strongly suggest avoiding using DSN's on the boxes, create your connect strings in your programs, then you can move them around without worrying.

If you find a good direct-connect solution, please provide the information! While ODBC was sufficient, it still requires MDAC and all that being installed in addition to the perl libs.

good luck!