And I'm confused on another point?   Why did you need to download anything manually?   You should have been able to say "ppm install DBD-ODBC" and PPM would have gone to the ActiveState site and grabbed the latest and installed it.   Is there some reason you are trying to install from ZIP files?

from the DOS command line you can either enter 'ppm' in its interactive mode by just typing 'ppm' and then do a search, like:

search DBD
then do an install:
install DBD-ODBC

Then you should have what you need. With Active State you do not need to download zip files and install them. You can use ppm to handle the process, find the latest version and then allow you to install.

jdtoronto

Both of your responses were correct. Thanks. Once I simply used ppm, I could install the DBD-ODBC module without incident. I can now access my database fine.

However, when I execute the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use DBI;

my @drivers = DBI->available_drivers;
die 'no drivers installed' unless @drivers;

for my $driver (@drivers) {
    print "driver:\t$driver\n";
    my @dsns = DBI->data_sources($driver);
    for my $dsn (@dsns) {
        print "dsn:\t$dsn\n";
    }
}
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I get the following output:

C:\Perl\source>perl dbtest.pl
driver: ExampleP
dsn:    dbi:ExampleP:dir=.
driver: ODBC
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:MS Access Database
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:Excel Files
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:dBASE Files
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:Visual FoxPro Tables
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:Visual FoxPro Database
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:testdb
driver: Proxy
install_driver(Proxy) failed: Can't locate RPC/PlClient.pm in @INC (@I
+NC contain
s: C:/Perl/lib C:/Perl/site/lib .) at C:/Perl/site/lib/DBD/Proxy.pm li
+ne 28.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:/Perl/site/lib/DBD/Proxy.pm lin
+e 28.
Compilation failed in require at (eval 3) line 3.
Perhaps a module that DBD::Proxy requires hasn't been fully installed
 at dbtest.pl line 10

C:\Perl\source>
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Any ideas on what's going on with the Proxy driver? Should I be concerned about this?

If you don't need the DBD::Proxy driver then you shouldn't be concerned, but if you do you can just use ppm to install the RPC::PlClient package as well and solve the problem.

---

We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

You are asking DBI what drivers it knows about.   You are then asking each driver what data sources it knows about.   But to ask each driver for that information, DBI has to load the module for each driver.   At that point you discovered that DBD::Proxy had some dependencies you hadn't installed yet.   As jasonk said, this isn't really a problem unless you _really_ wanted to use the Proxy driver.

I added a couple lines to your code to skip trying to load module DBD::Proxy and ran the loops to completion:

    print "driver:\t$driver\n";
    if( $driver eq 'Proxy' ) {
        print "  skipping polling DSN's for Proxy driver.\n";
        next;
    }
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The output (on my system) was:

driver: CSV
dsn:    DBI:CSV:f_dir=test1
driver: Chart
driver: ExampleP
dsn:    dbi:ExampleP:dir=.
driver: File
dsn:    DBI:File:f_dir=test1
driver: ODBC
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:dBASE Files
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:Excel Files
dsn:    DBI:ODBC:MS Access Database
driver: Proxy
  skipping polling DSN's for Proxy driver.
driver: SQLite
driver: mysql
dsn:    DBI:mysql:mysql
dsn:    DBI:mysql:mytest
dsn:    DBI:mysql:test