You don't need to use DBD::Oracle in most cases. I've only ever used it when I want to use the constants it defines for oracle data types (as in use DBD::Oracle qw(:ora_types)). But generally, DBI will handle the loading and use of the correct DBD based on the connect string you feed it.

So one thing is to try eliminating that line and see what happens.

Also: make sure you set $ENV{ORACLE_HOME}, because the script may not be running in an environment in which that variable is set. Since the DBI stuff is loaded at compile time, I set that variable in a BEGIN block.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# please pardon the *nix-isms!

BEGIN {
    $ENV{ORACLE_HOME} = '/path/to/oracle/install';
}

use DBI;
use strict;

my $db = DBI->connect('dbi:Oracle:host="oracle.host.com";sid="whatever
+"', $user, $pass)
    or die "Can't connect to server: $DBI::errstr\n";

print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
print "Hey, I got this far!";
[download]

HTH

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor