Right -- and I didn't tell you everything about how I set this client up. I used a module for credentials and the DSN information like this:

package ABCDB;

our $DSN      = 'Driver=FreeTDS;ServerName=SqlServer;Database=ABCDAT';
our $User     = 'User';
our $Password = 'Password';

our $Attributes =
  { LongReadLen => 65535, LongTruncOk => 1, odbc_query_timeout => 30 }
+;
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Then, in each of the scripts I wrote, a connection just uses the boilerplate

my $dbh = DBI->connect ( "dbi:ODBC:$ABCDB::DSN", $ABCDB::User,
  $ABCDB::Password, $ABCDB::Attributes );
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And a final note .. this module is in a separate directory specifically so that it's *not* included in the repository. Never include any authentication in a repository, even if it's a private one.