In fact, there are lots of ways. You might want to consider a framework and an ORM layer to simplify your HTML and DB interaction. But here's a nice barebones solution in the vein of your original code.

See CGI for more information. ( http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm-3.49/lib/CGI.pm )

#!/usr/bin/perl

use DBI;
use CGI;
use strict; use warnings;

my $q= CGI->new();
print $q->header(), $q->start_html();


# Connect to the database
# See footnote 1
my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:mirnas', 'user', 'pass')
    or die "Couldn't open database: $DBI::errstr; stopped";
    
    
# Getting all the column names
my $table = '07_11_09';
my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT * FROM $table WHERE 1=0;");
$sth->execute;
my @cols = @{$sth->{NAME}}; # or NAME_lc if needed
$sth->finish;
 print $q->checkbox_group(          -name=>'databases',
                                -values=>[@cols],
                                -linebreak=>'true',
                                #-labels=>\%labels,
                                #-attributes=>\%attributes
);

print $q->end_html();
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