I'm guessing you're not using Generator here? (If you were, you could do the ODBC calls directly from within Flash...)

With a straight Flash file, AFAIK, the best ways to get external variables into a movie are either from an external text file or passing them through the URL of the embed tag.

If you want this to be dynamic, then the text file is out.

So what I would do if I were in your shoes, is use the Perl to output the HTML page that holds the EMBED and OBJECT tags, and dynamically change the bit of your URL that could hold variables.

Your EMBED will have something like src="myflashmovie.swf". You can easily change that to be src = "myflashmovie.swf?var1=foo&var2=bar", where the values "foo" and "bar" are substituted based on your ODBC select.

Does that make any sense? I could go into more detail...