See the DBI, which is the Perl abstraction. Something like the following should be what you need:

my $sth = $dbh->prepare_cached(<<SQL);
    select count(*) as results from database_table
SQL

$sth->execute();

my @results = $sth->fetchrow_array();
print $results[0];
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Update: kyle noted that execute does not return the results, fetchrow_array does.