in reply to Perl/Oracle/Newbie Connect Problem

You need to set some environment variables, either in your environment (d'oh), or directly in Perl:
$ENV{ORACLE_HOME} = ...; $ENV{OCI_NLS_CHARSET_ID} = ...;

Or supply both hostname and sid, as mentioned in the DBD::Oracle documentation.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.