A lot depends on the monk's RDBMS. I prefer a native DBD::MySQL driver to the more generic ODBC connect, but to each their own.

snippet to list ODBC data sources:

  #! perl -w
  use strict;
  use DBI;
  my @driver_names = DBI->available_drivers;
  print join("\n",@driver_names), "\n";
  my @dataSources = DBI->data_sources ("ODBC");
  print join("\n-",@dataSources);
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---- I am what I read