my $dsn =
 "Driver={Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)};" .
 "Dbq=c:\\your_nifty_folder\\your_nifty_db.mdb;" .
 "Uid=admin;" .
 "Pwd=";

my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:$dsn");
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1. You want to store a file in Access in a field
2. You want to load a file into a table as records of that table

For option one, i'm not really sure how to do it in Access, however its pretty damn easy with oracle. (one way is to unpack your file (if it is binary) to hex, then store it in a CLOB).

For option two, Access has some pretty sophisticated filters that will allow the importing of files into a table... couple that with some of the VB "magic" you have there, and you can easily put a file into Access (altho' i think this is the wrong forum for that.)

About your oracle solution, why would you want to unpack and store in a clob... I would directly store the binary data in a blob... (even if i wanted to store it in a text format, i'd probably prefer to use base64, not base 16:hex )

I really cannot imagine having the data take twice it's real size (hex<=>binary).

The 1st thing i tried was a CLOB, it worked, so i kept the solution in place (i was in a rush). I've never retrieved binary data using the DBI, so wasnt sure it would work, or how easy it would be.

With the infrastructure in place the application performed within acceptable parameters, so I never bothered researching it further. Lazy? you bet... :-)

my $statement = "Insert into tableOne (filename, letter) values (?, ?)
+";
...
$sth->execute($filename, $letter);
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use strict;
my $filename = "File_Name_One";
my $letter = "A";
my $filecontents = "";

open( FH, "<$filename" ) || die "unable to open $filename ($!)\n";
{
   local( $/ );
   undef $/;
   $filecontents = <FH>;
}
close( FH );

my $firstvar = $dbh->quote($filecontents);
my $secondvar = $dbh->quote($letter);

my $statement = "Insert into tableOne (filename, letter)  values ($fil
+econtents, $letter)";
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The usual caveats apply - the contents of the file need to match the definition of the column (large enough, binary vs text, etc).

-derby

Thanks for many responses. I just want to load the filename and the letter in the database not the contents of the file.

Is the above script going to work? I cant seem to get it to work.

Okay. For your above script, put some error checking into it so you can see where the failure is taking place.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my $filename = "File_Name_One";
my $letter = "A";

my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:ODBC:databasename", "","")
                   || die "error: ($DBI::errstr)\n";

my $firstvar = $dbh->quote($filename);
my $secondvar = $dbh->quote($letter);

my $statement = "Insert into tableOne (filename, letter)
  values ($firstname, $letter)";

# Now you need to actually execute the statement
$dbh->do( $statment ) || die "error: $dbh->errstr\n";

# rest of code
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-derby

I have no idea if Access supports it, but most databases provide some sort of `large object' or `blob' (binary large object) functions which support efficiently storing large chunks of otherwise unstructured text or binary data in the database. Check the corresponding DBD documentation and see if it makes any mention of blobs and functions for accessing them.