I must speak in defense of ODBC, even though I haven't gotten it to work yet. With the help I've received in this thread from PostgreSQL's email list, I hope to install the necessary driver and get things working soon. I've also received help from one of Cygwin's newsgroups, and I'm sure there is a support community (in addition to Perl Monks) that could help you with SQL Server problems. The standard instructions sucked, but I have no problem with the support communities.

I rejected DBD::Pg and DBD::PgPP, which I think means that I rejected DBI (which is described an alternative to ODBC though DBD::ODBC requires the DBI module...I'm just accepting that stuff for now). DBD::Pg was rejected because I heard of a monk who couldn't get the current version working on Windows, and I heard elsewhere that an old version of MSVC is required, and I don't want to be limited to an old version of anything. DBD::PgPP was suggested, but I don't want to use a non-core .05 version of a module, especially when it has so many non-core dependencies. That's when ODBC was suggested.

I'm going to (attempt to) use DBD::ODBC instead of Win32::ODBC because I want more portability.

Semi-off-topic observation: When software doesn't have a simple installer, it's because it's not known how to install it, and expect the documentation to suck more than usual.

Fully off-topic observation: Much of the Perl documentation sucks (details available upon request). I heard that there is excellent Python Documentation. Nuff said.