You may want to use DBD::Sybase instead. That being said, use the bcp utility as it is much more reliable and faster. Don't be afraid of using non-Perl tools where appropriate. :)

Update: The wrappers mentioned below are released as: DBIx::BulkUtil. Sybase bcp, Oracle sqlldr, and SybaseIQ "LOAD TABLE" are covered.

Go ahead and use bcp, you can even call it from perl. I have wrappers around bcp and sqlldr. No, sorry, I can't share them. Well, here's a bit of the bcp method:

sub bcp_in {
  my $self = shift;
  my $opts = (ref $_[-1]) ? pop @_ : {};

  my ( $table, $file, $dir ) = @_;

  # bcp_out is just bcp_in called with $dir = 'out'
  $file ||= "$table.bcp";
  $dir  ||= 'in';

...snip
  my $pid = open(my $fh, "-|");

  confess "Can't fork: $!" unless defined $pid;
  # UTF-8 doesn't work on HP - default is roman8
  unless ($pid) {
    # Enclose in block so we don't get exec warning
    my $commit_size = $opts->{CommitSize} || 1000;
    my @max_errors  = $opts->{MaxErrors} ? (-m => $opts->{MaxErrors} )
+ : ();
    my @header_opt = ($opts->{Header} && $dir eq 'in') ? (-F => $opts-
+>{Header}+1) : ();
    {exec("bcp", $bcp_table, $dir, $file,
      -U => $user,
      -P => $self->{PASSWORD},
#      -J => "utf8",
      -S => $server,
      "-c",
      -t => $delimiter,
      -r => $row_delimiter,
      -b => $commit_size,
      @header_opt,
      @id_opt,
      @max_errors,
    )};
    warn "Could not exec bcp: $!\n";
    exit 1;
  }
  my $rows;
  local ($_, $.);
  while (<$fh>) {
    print;
    $rows = $1 if /^(\d+) rows copied/;
  }
  close $fh;
  confess "BCP error" unless defined $rows;
  return $rows;
}
[download]

Michael