What is OraPerl?

Oraperl was a Perl 4 binary (with Oracle OCI calls compiled in) used to access Oracle from Perl programs. OraPerl was superseded by the more generic DBI database driver in Perl 5, which uses DBD::Oracle to access Oracle.

For compatibility DBD::Oracle ships with an OraPerl emulation layer. This emulation layer can run legacy oraperl scripts without modification by translating the oraperl API calls into the corresponding DBI calls. However, the preferred method for database access is DBI.