I am sorry to hear you are not prepared to pursue this but also not surprised if you have found another solution which does the job. Although the error message is "optional feature not implemented" you appear to have found one of only 2 ODBC drivers I have come across in over 10 years which do not support setting/getting the autocommit attribute. I don't think it would be that great an issue to patch DBD::ODBC to ignore autocommit but have never had the impetus to do this since until now I've only come across one driver (out of dozens) it would benefit. I have no experience with WIN32::OLE so cannot comment on any advantages of disadvantages (other than the one you have found) but I wish you the best of luck. If, for any reason you come back to DBD::ODBC let me know at my cpan address and I might be prepared to look at this myself. At present, it appears to be a niche requirement.