Perl is very much for the administrator and developer and not for the end user.  It has a prominent place in the toolbox, but it's not for end users.

My one criticism of the article is, as with most SQL Server script examples, it has a password hard coded in, in plain text.  No wonder the young folk all think that's perfectly acceptable!   DBAs kill themselves setting up least privelege and "useless by default", and then here are these plain text passwords in the code - or worse, on the command line!

Aside from that, let me mention DBI:Sybase (and perhaps, Sybperl). 

If you are connecting from a non-Windows box, the Win32 module won't do you a bit of good.  Or, if you come from a database background instead of a Windows background, you might be more comfortable with db-lib than ODBC.  In that case, the DBI:Sybase modules are the way to go.

The trick is to compile with the FreeTDS libraries instead of the Microsoft or the Sybase libraries, and you can talk to anything that uses a TDS stream from a single binary.

Roger Reid