You didn't say if your client perl program was going to be running on NT or UNIX. If it is going to be running on NT, you should have no problems, DBD::ODBC works just fine and is as good performance-wise because MS Sql is as-fast w/ ODBC as with any other driver:

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:MQIS","USER","PASSWORD");
[download]

where MQIS is your ODBC DSN.

If your client is gonna run on UNIX (or any OS for which MS does not provide client-side ODBC libraries) you have 2 choices:

• DBD::Proxy - run a proxy DBD on an NT box and have your perl programs use DBD::Proxy to connect to the proxy.
• 3rd party ODBC driver - there are some 3rd party ODBC drivers for MS Sql server (some commercial, some not) that you could use. I've never used these (don't even know where to get them), but I have heard that they exist :)

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