Maybe this example will help you, the MYSQL server is on the same machine that I am running perl on.

use strict;
   use DBI;
   my $db="test";
   my $host="gmontematorlt.sjcorp.focusframe.com";
   my $userid="guest";
   my $passwd="password";
   my $connectionInfo="dbi:mysql:$db;$host";

# make connection to database
   my $dbh = DBI->connect($connectionInfo,$userid,$passwd);
   my $sth = $dbh->prepare ("SELECT name, category FROM animals");
   $sth->execute ();
   print "<?xml version=\"1.0\"?>\n";
   print "<dataset>\n";
   while (my ($name, $category) = $sth->fetchrow_array ())
   {
       print " <row>\n";
       print "  <name>$name</name>\n";
       print "  <category>$category</category>\n";
       print " </row>\n";
   }
   $dbh->disconnect ();
   print "</dataset>\n";
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