I mainly have one piece of advice, and it's the same for about 10 years now:

ignore everything that is not running under DBI

Now that means you still have to choose a DBD driver. These are the options I know of, and that I consider viable:

• DBD::ODBC: Works very well, especially from Windows to Windows, but you may have to install some extra software to make it make connections from a Linux client.

• DBD::Sybase: Allegedly MS SQL Server is based on the Sybase SQL server engine, and this driver ought to be useable for MS SQL Server too. However, this has always been a bit iffy and I sincerely doubt that the situation can be improving. I really don't expect it to: after all the two products are gradually growing apart.

• DBD::ADO: I never got this to work, but allegedly some people are quite happy using it.

Personally, I'd (still) go for DBD::ODBC.