I understand the risk of SQL injection attacks; however, I don't think that it is really a problem in this situation because this script will be used only by me to update the inventory daily. It will not be hosted on the website. I am, however, attempting to update the script to use placeholders. In addition to its advantages, it will help me to learn Perl a little bit better :) Thanks.
Comment on Re^2: MySQL Data Insertion Errors w/ Perl
OK, so you can trust the user of the script. Fair enough. Do you trust the data that you are feeding to it? Your data is, effectively, executable code.