Are you sure you mean DBI::Oracle, or do you mean DBI and DBD::Oracle? I am writing this on a Windows XP 32-bit machine running ActivePerl 5.8.9 and have been using DBD::Oracle seamlessly for years to connect to our Oracle 10g DB. As you are using ActiveState, did you attempt to install the package using PPM? How do you know it wasn't working? Your connector should look something like:

my $db_name = 'host=db.url.com;port=1521;sid=user';
my $db_user = 'userid';
my $db_pass = 'passwd';
my @dbi_path = ("dbi:Oracle:$db_name",$db_user,$db_pass);
my $oracle = DBI->connect(  @dbi_path,
                    {
                        PrintError => 0,
                        RaiseError => 0,
                        AutoCommit => 0,
                    }
                )
        or die "Database connect to $db_name failed:" . $DBI::errstr;
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