The Perl DBI module provides a generic interface for database access. You can write a DBI script that works with many different database engines without change. To use DBI, you must install the DBI module, as well as a DataBase Driver (DBD) module for each type of database server you want to access. For MySQL, this driver is the DBD::mysql module.
Perl support is not included with MySQL distributions. You can obtain the necessary modules from http://search.cpan.org for Unix, or by using the ActiveState ppm program on Windows. The following sections describe how to do this.
The DBI/DBD interface requires Perl 5.6.0, and 5.6.1 or later is preferred. DBI does not work if you have an older version of Perl. You should use DBD::mysql 4.009 or higher. Although earlier versions are available, they do not support the full functionality of MySQL 8.0.