in reply to DBD::mysql and MariaDB

Okay! The DBD::MariaDB worked. Here is the necessary line:
my $dsn = 'DBI:MariaDB:database=my_db;host=localhost';
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, 'root', '');

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The capitalization of "MariaDB" is required and "mysql" doesn't work.
After unzipping DBD-MariaDB-master.zip, I did a standard install from source:
$ cd DBD-MariaDB-master
$ perl Makefile.PL 
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom