extremely is right that you should treat the MS SQL server like a Sybase server. More specifically, rather than downloading the Sybase libraries themselves, you should use FreeTDS, which is a free software reverse engineering of the TDS libraries which drive both Sybase and MS SQL.

You'll find that the documentation for being able to talk to an MS SQL server is quite good, I think.

You should also get your hands on a program called sqsh, which is a free software command line SQL interface to Sybase/MS SQL. Basically, it's to those databases what sqlplus is to Oracle.

Also, you'll want to consider your choices in terms of a Perl interface to the database. The obvious choice is DBI, using DBD::Sybase. However, DBD::Sybase is still relatively young and unstable, and it doesn't do a lot of things one might want. Unless you need your database code to be written so that it could be easily ported to another database, I would recommend using the Sybase::* modules instead. They aren't DBI-based, but will get you mostly everything you need from DBI except the modularity. (Sybase::* is the Perl5 version of sybperl, the TDS equivalent of oraperl). Both DBD::Sybase and Sybase::* are written and maintained by Michael Peppler, and he prefers the latter, so that's what I generally use when forced to interface with MS SQL.

-dlc