I had similar problems, and ended up using Win32::ODBC.

In one case, I had to run several hundered different queries against a foxpro table, and, when using win32::ODBC to connect to foxpro, I found that each different query required about 1/5 of a second to run. So, in that case, I first selected the entire table, and saved it in mysql, and then ran the different queries against the it, using DBI. That made the entire operation approximately 30 times faster.