I totally agree with everything you write. The customer actually previously has used a consultant with special SQL DBA skills, so I'll make sure he will take care of this instead of me. ;-) This is not my job - you're right.

Would be nice to learn more about it for my own sake, though, since it's quite basic to make my part of the job to go online, so I'll take a closer look at the SQL Server Books Online.

As for the security issue; you are right again, and the plan is definitely to use another port than the default (1433), plus restricting the database access to connections from the webserver's IP address. The code I posted is simply a "first stage connection test code", so far I've only tried it with a test installation of MSSQL on one of our own servers. :-)

Who knows, maybe I'll write a little tutorial when I'm done - something like a "Step-by-step tutorial for ALL you need to know about connecting to a remote MSSQL database server from your local Perl script using DBI-ODBC". (Including all neccessary tasks on both servers). It believe it would be appreciated by many a monk. Take care! :-)