The reason I ask is that depending on your work set-up, many people connect from their desktop using a database client tool like Toad for Oracle or DbVisualizer. Then they do their Perl work on a work server of some sort that has the proper modules installed and configured.

There are various ways to run the code from Perl modules without installing it in the usual admin-protected areas.

But before going down that road I would ask if this is a work computer and you need to use Perl and DBI to do some of your work, is there any way to can get the proper permissions to configure your work environment?

Yes I do need to use it for work. But you know how it works. It will take sometime before the admins do this two sec job. So in that period of time, is there a way to connect to oracle db without using DBI?

You have no permissions even for a local installation?

Makeshifts last the longest.

Havent tried this , but another colleague of mine was getting errors while doing local installation. I will give this a shot and see it works. thanks for your help.

But, for some reason the installation on my company provided desktop or even on the unix server does not have this module (or it was stripped from base installation for some reason).

DBI & DBD::Oracle are not part of the core perl distribution, so they would have been installed by somebody at the other places you've worked.

How do I connect to oracle databases without DBI module??

Well, I guess you could drive one of the command line tools - but I wouldn't recommend it.

I cannot install or build it on my machine , coz I do not have enough rights.

Talking to your sysadmins and getting them to install it, or getting the rights to install it yourself will almost certainly be simpler than attempting to roll your own solution.