Like the monks have said, DBI is the way to go. This is the standard way to connect to a database in Perl, and has been for a while. This example uses DBI to do the same thing with a mysql database, the only difference in using Oracle is that the connection routine would have to change and you would have to use DBD::Oracle. (you have to set some env variables when connecting, ORACLE_HOME, and ORACLE_SID, i believe, but check out the docs).

Anyway, the get_catnames() routine which returns a reference to an array which is handed over to the CGI.pm popup_menu() function would work just the same in oracle, providing it was working with a valid $dbh.

#!/usr/bin/perl -Tw

use strict;
use CGI qw# :standard :form #;
use DBI;
use DBD::mysql;

my $dbh = get_handle('dbname', 'dbuser', 'dbpasswd');
my $listref = get_catnames( \$dbh ); # sending a ref

print header;
print start_html;
print popup_menu( -name=>'categories', -value=>$listref );

$dbh->disconnect;

#####
#####

sub get_catnames {
my $dbh  = shift;
my @cats = ();

my $statement = "select category_name from mtx_catnames";

my $sta = $$dbh->prepare($statement); # deref this
   $sta->execute;
my $cats = $sta->fetchall_arrayref;

 for my $row ( @{ $cats } ) {
 push @cats, $row->[0];
 }

return \@cats;

}


sub get_handle {
my ($DB, $DBUSER, $DBPASS) = @_;
my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:database=$DB;host=localhost";
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $DBUSER, $DBPASS)
          or die( qq|cannot connect to database $DB| );

return $dbh;

}
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