Hi David, Thanks for the prompt reply. Sorry if I didn't make it clear but up to the "expecting MSSQL" was for background information only, leading up to my two questions and you are correct I was speaking about PHP, by "restrictions" the question was is there one rule for Linux users and another for Windows users in PERL, as there appears to be with PHP. My second question relates to the fact that PHP has the ability to pass information and receive information through PHP SESSIONS variables.I want to pass this info into a PERL script do my database query and return the result back to a variable that I could pickup using my PHP calling Script.