> Why can't we apply TIMTOWTDI on modules

I would have to disgree on that one. Although there are no official standards for accessing databases through perl, DBI has become the unofficial standard. In this specific question, (Mork seems to be a newbie user, learning perl, etc) I would recommend against swimming against the tide. I'd stick with chromatic's DBI suggestion, so that Mork can share his/her doubts with other monks that use DBI (be it on MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and not only Sybase).

> But swapping database servers isn't common

Again, I have to disagree. There are many cases in which people switch databases on a daily, maybe hourly base! I have a real example I use almost everyday at work:

My company develops systems for clients that use several different flavors of DBMS's. All of the developers have perl, IIS and Access (DBD::ODBC) installed on their machines. Our main staging server has Oracle (DBD::Oracle) and our clients might use Informix, DB2, MySQL, MS SQL, Postgres, you name it... That's a clear example of how one might switch from DBD::ODBC, to DBD::Oracle, to DBD::Whatever on an hourly basis!

Just my R$0.02 worth, anyway.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!