I always access DBD::ODBC through DBI. (I don't know how to talk to it directly.) While some claim that ODBC is "slow", I've not found it to be slow for the standard SQL statements I use.

I'm sure that it's probably significantly slower than other DBI backends for some workloads and or databases, but I haven't run across it yet.

I tend to use it for simple DDL and DML manipulations with small tables (less than 10 million rows).

...roboticus