Summary of perldoc:

tar -xzvf your_module.tar.gz # one-step decompression
cd your_module_dir
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install # assuming tests are successful
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I suspect, however, that the last stage isn't going to work for you, as I believe you need to be root on the machine to run make install (this would also make DBI available to everyone on that machine.

You may find that you need to load DBI manually into each application you write using either:

use DBI;
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require DBI;
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You'd probably want to try testing things out using a require (which, as I recall, would allow you to roll a custom importation script for debugging) and then, once you know everything is running correctly, switching over to use (which will import the DBI module at compile time).

Comments:
• You dont need root access to install DBI in your own directories though you may get warnings if the install tries to add the docs to the Perl doc tree.
• perl Makefile.PL Prefix=/pathtoyourdir/ should get round that
• I dont see what use followed by require will give you (though that could be me missing something)

Sorry, I meant that as an either/or case, not both in one script.

My point was that using require you can run a series of tests (see Camel Book pg. 205) allowing you to determine points of failure in the import routine more specifically that via a use.