May I ask, just out of curiosity, what weird database are they connecting to? This sounds overcomplicated.

Yes, it does. The usual way to connect to a database would be to use DBI and some DBD::xxx module specific to the database in use. E.g. DBD::Oracle, DBD::Pg, DBD::MariaDB (also for MySQL), DBD::SQLite, or if everything else fails, DBD::ODBC plus the ODBC driver for the database plus an ODBC manager (comes with Windows, something like unixODBC needs to be installed on Unix).

Alexander

If the heart of the requirement is Inline::Java, that works great on Linux, which is probably better for servers (and for sure, cheaper than Windows licences).

It might well then make sense to consider moving off Java to DBI, as afoken says. But it can be done in a multi-stage way.