I don't have Firebird or Interbase available for testing, but according to the docs on CPAN , it looks like you can do this: $dbh->{ib_timestampformat} = '%m.%d.%Y %H:%M:%S'; to set the timestamp to the format you need. Any time you use $dbh, your time will be the same. If you are working with just the date format, the similar should work, modified according to the docs to set the Date format.

Unfortunately, since I don't have a compatible db to work with, I wasn't able to test this in a production environment.

HTH,
digger