How to connect to PostgreSQL using Perl

This article describes how to connect to a PostgreSQL database using Perl's DBI (Database Interface) module.

Connecting to PostgreSQL using the DBI (Database Interface) module

The DBI module enables your Perl scripts to connect to PostgreSQL databases.

To connect to PostgreSQL using the DBI module, follow these steps:

1. Use the following Perl code to connect to PostgreSQL and select a database. Replace username with your username, password with your password, and dbname with the database name:

   use DBI;
   $myConnection = DBI->connect("DBI:Pg:dbname=dbname;host=localhost", "username", "password");
   

2. After the code connects to PostgreSQL and selects the database, you can run SQL queries and perform other operations. For example, the following Perl code runs a SQL query that extracts the last names from the employees table, and stores the result in the $result variable:
   

   $query = $myConnection->prepare("SELECT lastname FROM employees");
   $result = $query->execute();
   

More Information

To view the online documentation for Perl's DBI, please visit http://dbi.perl.org/docs.