A quick follow up for future reference. The resolution was to compile DBD::Oracle myself, which by the way was not as straight forward as it should have been. But, once I got a good compile, things started working. This solution appears to be working like a champ.

While I did, eventually, figure out how to load the precompiled DBD::Oracle as suggested, in spite of the company firewall and ftp proxy, that only resulted in runtime error dialogs.