It is possible, and there is a good discussion about it at Connecting to MS SQL Server from Perl-Linux. My advice is if you're going to go completely away from MS then put your efforts towards converting the database now instead of later...it has been my experience that none of these methods work as well (or as simply) as advertised.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"