The answer would appear to be: use SELECT statements to query the database and see if it contains what you expect it to (but perhaps I'm missing part of your requirements). You can issue these SELECTs the same way you issue your INSERTS (e.g. through a web front end) or else you can use a command line tool. If you don't have access to MySQL's native command line tool, you can try dbish, in the DBI::Shell distribution which provides a generic command line tool for all DBI accessible databases and can be installed by a non-root user in any directory.