I know it doesn't answer your question how to do this in Perl, but can't you use the MySQL Administrator program to access and manage the MySQL-server? It's the way I manage all my MySQL-servers.

If the only Perl involved is "wrapping" a Perl-script around a system call, it seems hardly worth the trouble. Still, if that is what you want, have a look at the MySQL Instance Manager which you can access from a remote site.