I'll second DBI and MIME::Lite. You may also be interested in using SpreadSheet::WriteExcel or Text::CSV for writing your file, depending on what your data looks like.

DBI + Text::CSV_XS + PerlIO::gzip =>

use DBI;
use PerlIO::gzip;

my $sth = $dbh->prepare ("select * from table");
   $sth->execute;
my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({ binary => 1, auto_diag => 1 });
open my $fh, ">:gzip", "output.csv.gz" or die "output.csv.gz: $!";
while (my $row = $sth->fetch) {
    $csv->print ($fh, $row);
    }
[download]

If needed add the :encoding(utf8) layer


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

In addition to the mentioned modules, also consider looking at Querylet, which allows easy integration of SQL statements and record output to text files, CSV files, HTML or XLS files.

What you’d really like to do, of course, is either to send the items as a zipped-up attachment, or, better yet, provide an internal web-page that users could link to to view the data.

If you can store the data in a read-only file in a place where everyone can see, just send them an e-mail with a hotlink to it ...   A “UNC” fileref of the form \\servername\filename\ eliminates issues of drive-letter assignments, if you know that every intended recipient can reach and access the referenced file.

The question really should be asked (by someone if not by you), whether such a voluminous output is really useful and satisfactory to the business needs of its recipients.   I seriously doubt that it is.

At least in my case, Certainly such a voluminous data is useful for the business to review how much junk data got inserted into the system and take necessary actions on that.