in reply to perl /cron /DBI

Do you have read-access to the cron log (perhaps /var/cron/log)? That will show whether and how well the job ran.

Also, when you run the script, you are doing so in some shell, with your own profile (paths, environment variables, etc.). The cron job runs in a default shell, without your profile; so as the others suggest, you should always specify the full paths.