A segment is a contiguous piece of memory allocated to a program at runtime. A program generally has more than one segment allocated to it, usually at least a read-only one for code and a read-writeable one for data.

A segmentation fault occurs when a program attempts either to write to a read-only segment or to read or write from/to a segment that doesn;t belong to it. Unless you're a hacker of legendary proportions, who would therefore know exactly what caused it already, it is inconceivable that you could have induced perl to seg fault. Oracle wouldn't segfault on an invalid login (or at least, it's been a lo-ong ti-ime since Oracle was that flaky {strokes beard} ;))

After a segmentation fault there will be a file left over called "core" (the core dump of the actually crashed program, which I expect not to be perl :)). A quick and dirty way to get clues as to its cause is to look at:

strings core | more
[download]

This will at least confirm what really crashed and therefore which vendor to ask for support.