and dbish are great. There's a lot in there although the interfaces is sometimes confusing. The basic thing you're missing, I think is a DSN. Try something along the lines of dbish dbi:DBM: e.g. for using DBD::DBM. Note this should be everthing that normally goes in the DSN, including the colon after the driver name. You can also add user, password and other flags as arguments to dbish, including --batch which runs it in batch mode (e.g. reading a bunch of SQL from a file and executing it).