in reply to DBI/Oracle stored procedure newbee question

exec is a SQL*Plus command. See http://search.cpan.org/author/TIMB/DBD-Oracle-1.12/Oracle.pm for how to call a stored proc, i.e.
$csr = $db->prepare(q{ BEGIN PLSQL_EXAMPLE.PROC_NP; END; }); $csr->execute;