I don't know anything about Firebird/Interbase, but I've had this problem with other RDBMSs before. One possibility is to connect to a system database (many RDBMSs have these to store metadata) in your call to connect and then issue a USE or CREATE DATABASE command once connected. If that doesn't work, you'll need to find a command line tool that works with the RDBMS - something you can use outside of perl to create the database so that you have something to connect to.