..and welcome to the monastery and to the wonderful world of Perl! (<-- added later..)

As LanX said I'd use Term::ReadLine and probably Term::ReadKey merely to hide password submission ( using ReadMode 2; then reverting to 0).

The only thing I can suggest is to maximize the autocomplete feature of Term::ReadLine to speed up things. You can autocomplete all SQL syntax and or all table names or even column names if needed.

I suspect that autocmplete feature can also help you in quoting: typing INSERT INTO USE then hitting TAB and magically get back "USERS" with double quotes around it (untested!).

See Re^3: about Term::ReadLine and it's imported function The Solution with two demos on how to use $term->Attribs->{completion_function} correctly.

Share your progresses!

L*