Take a look at DBI. The connect and/or connect_cached methods create a connection to the database and return a handle that can be used with other DBI methods. The connection itself is very simple:

my $dbh = DBI->connect($data_source, $username, $auth, \%attr);
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If you want to connect to an Oracle database, you'll also have to use DBD::Oracle;, which provides the drivers (see DBD::Oracle).

Please also look through some of the excellent posts in our Tutorials section, including:

• Before asking a database related question ...
• DBI recipes
• Reading from a database

Finally, there is http://dbi.perl.org and Programming the Perl DBI.