Perl support for MySQL is provided by means of the DBI/DBD client interface. The 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.

To use transactions with Perl DBI, you must use DBD::mysql 2.0900 or newer. To use the MySQL 4.1 or newer client library, you must use DBD::mysql 2.9003 or newer. Support for server-side prepared statements requires DBD::mysql 3.0009 or newer. Current versions of DBD::mysql on CPAN are 4.xxxx or higher and support all these capabilities.

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.

Perl support for MySQL must be installed if you want to run the MySQL benchmark scripts; see Section 7.12.2, “The MySQL Benchmark Suite”. It is also required for the MySQL Cluster ndb_size.pl utility; see ndb_size.pl.