Perl, using the DBI module, connects quite well to MS SQL Server 7 (as does Win32::ODBC). Perhaps if you were to tell us what your error message is and post a more extensive code snippet? Maybe your code above is pseudo-code, but hash-name is a bareword and the minus sign "-" embedded in it is going to cause Perl to want to interpolate those barewords as scalars.

Cheers,
Ovid

Update: It looks like an error message was posted, but the site appears to be having problems today and I couldn't see it.

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