We have done *exactly* what you need at our office, using the DBD::JDBC driver with DBI.

DBD::JDBC will require you to have access to the Microsoft's JDBC drivers (which are freely available). You'll have to run a small java-executable that comes with DBD::JDBC on your Unix system which relays request from the Perl module to the jdbc driver.

The only problem we had was that the java-executable sometimes just decided to die. Because we only needed access for a batch job, we decided have our perl script start and stop the executable and the respective beginning and end of the job...

Nicest about this solution is you only use a plain perl module, and plain java and the MSSQL jdbc-jar, so you can easily do this on any platform without compiling a thing.