The Sybase BCP api is indeed limited with respect to certain datatypes, and cannot be used to load data to a table that does not use allpages locking.

sybperl 2.13_10 (a test release, available from http://www.peppler.org/downloads/) includes a new Sybase::BLK module, which is based on some new blk_*() calls in the Sybase::CTlib module. I suggest that you give that a try.

As for having bulk-loading available in DBI - it's an interesting idea, but you will almost always get much better speed by creating a load file and calling the database server's bulk-loading utility (like Sybase's bcp command) due to overhead in moving data around in perl.

I'm looking into ways of improving that, btw, but for now the overhead of using Sybase::BCP or Sybase::BLK is significant.

Michael