Oh yeah, DBI is actively being supported. The website URL has changed, it is now officially <http://dbi.perl.org>. It used to be on a small private webserver, and now not any more. That's progress.

The official support channel for people like yourself is the mailing list "dbi-users", see http://lists.perl.org for the archives and to subscribe, in case you have a question. Do not send support questions directly to Tim Bunce. If he had to answer every question he gets, he'd do nothing else all day. He'll just forward it to the above mailing list, any way. :-)

For the plain perl installation, people need to install DBI as well as the desired DBD::* driver for the database — which driver depends on the type of database. Use DBD::ODBC for MS-Access on Windows.

As for PerlApp, it will include the modules and any required DLL's or equivalent, inside the executable. So for this type of distribution, you needn't worry (much).