Thanks to Inman and marto for the pointers.

I have been able to install DBI after setting HTTP_proxy (not in the first try but after several tries). But DBI did not install mysql driver. So am trying to install DBD-Mysql module now.

I downloaded DBD-Mysql module from Activestate web as .zip file and unzipped to c:\temp\DBD-Mysql. Invoking "ppm install DBD-Mysql" command from this directory gives this error message :

Error: no suitable installation target found for package DBD-Mysql.

I also tried manually copying the files as given in the "Guide to installing PPMs" but that did not work complaining that perlCRT.dll is not available. I copied this file from the net to system path and tried to ran a test db script but perl.exe is generating errors.

Any pointers would be welcome.

--thanks in advance,

Mars