Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 24. ODBC Extension for Win32

Win32::ODBC allows you to make a connection to a database that supports ODBC under both Win32 and Unix. Win32::ODBC allows you to support as many ODBC connections as are allowed by memory and ODBC.

Generally, you’ll use Win32::ODBC to access databases such as those created under Microsoft Access, but there’s also an ODBC driver available for MySQL if you want to connect to MySQL via ODBC and aren’t able to use DBI and a DBD.

To get started, you’ll need to use new( ) to create a new Win32::ODBC object. As arguments, new( ) takes a connection string (DSN) or an open ODBC object if one is given. new( ) returns a database handle on success and undef on failure. For example:

use Win32::ODBC;

my $dsn = "DSN=Name of Database;UID=Your UID Here;PWD=dbpasswd;"
my $DB  = Win32::ODBC->new($dsn);