Perl, DBI, DBD - part 1

I'm trying to install an Oracle module for Perl.

What have i learned till now:

• The thing called "Oraperl" about which i kept hearing till now is mostly for Perl 4.
• As far as i understand now, the modern way to access relational darabases from Perl is DBI. It can be described, very roughly, as the Perl equivalent of ODBC - the DBI itself has generic functions, and below it there are Perlish drivers (DBD's) for different kind of database management systems (DBMS's) - Oracle, MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 etc. There's even a driver for ODBC and then the Perlish DBMS-specific driver is less important, however it is not safe to count on the availability of ODBC on non-Windows platforms.
• I succeeded at building recent versions of DBI and DBD::Oracle on Linux. The README's tell that the minimum requirement to build those packages is Oracle Client and Pro*C. I built it on the same machine on which the actual database server is installed, so i didn't run into any dependency problems. Later i'm gonna try it on a Windows machine, which only has Oracle Client. I can see Pro*C in Oracle Universal Installer under Oracle Homes/OraClient10g_home1/Oracle Client/Oracle Programmer, so i think that it's installed.
• The DBI homepage, dbi.perl.org, points to version 1.16 of DBD::Oracle as the latest version. It was released in 2004. However, there's a brand new 1.17 version, released in February of 2006, but it's labeled under different creator in CPAN, a company called Pythian. The CHANGES file says that Pythian indeed took over the further development of DBD::Oracle from Tim Bunce, the creator of DBI. I'm gonna report it to dbi.perl.org webmasters. Too bad i found out about it only after i already built and installed 1.16. Oh well.

I have five Kit Kat ChunKy's in my drawer. I told myself that i'm not eating any of them until i have a working Perl program which runs on both Linux and Windows and can succesfully SELECT SYSDATE FROM DUAL.