What you need to investigate is programming with DBI, Perl's library for
writing programs that work with a variety of databases, including MySQL
and others. Ideally, if you write a solid DBI program and later decide
to change the database backend, all you have to do is change the DBD
(database driver) call & double-check your SQL statements.

There are lots and lots and lots of web sites that go over introductory
DBI programming, not least of which is the official documentation for
DBI itself on CPAN -- <http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI/DBI.pm>.

But this topic is big enough to be worth reading a book, and the primary
book for this topic is O'Reilly's _Programming the Perl DBI_:

<http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldbi/>
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/>

Look over that material for starters, then feel free to come back to the
list with specific questions once you get started with it. Good luck!


--
Chris Devers