I think there IS a real performance problem when you use
ODBC instead of a native driver. ODBC is slow. I've never
seen a fast ODBC connection.
Unfortunately I've never seen a native SQL Server driver for
DBI. I once had to write some Perl to SQL Server, and we
used ADO.pm (I believe Matt Sergeant wrote that one). It
worked very well (and faster than DBI::ODBC), but that wasn't
what you would want, since it wasn't a DBD-driver.
There IS a DBI::ADO driver available though, but I've never
used it. It's at least faster than ODBC.