Actually I found this link to be more direct. The link in the above node took me to an indexed list. This link should take you to the page where you can download the package. And DB_File is listed there.(It wasn't alphabatized the way I expected, as the list makers put DB_F after DBF)

I've never seen an ActiveState install of perl where the ppm was missing. If you go to a command prompt and type in PPM, what kind of error message do you get?