Well, it looks like you have no experience with connecting to a database from without Perl. Luckely, there are various modules that do a lot of work for you. You should check out the DBI module, and a DBD driver for the RDBMS you work with. DBI is a generic interface, giving the same interface to many different database servers. There are also packages for specific databases, which will give you more features - but you lose in portability. Take your pick ;-)

-- Abigail