Well not a stupid question at all. Quite valid actually. First, just to clear up one thing, ODBC, Oracle Net, JDBC etc are not protocols. A protocol is usually describes network connectivity such as HTTP, FTTP, SIP etc and not database connectivity. What ODBC, Oracle Net JDBC are ports to the API (Application Programming Interface) of the database in question. They basically give a level playing field so that a select in ODBC is also a select in Oracle, MySQL, Sybase etc. The idea being you do not need to change your program when you change your database. You just change you ODBC,JDBC, settings. DBI (Database independent interface for perl) would be equlivialt to ODBC, JDBC etc and DBD::Oracle is the Oracle database driver for the DBI module. So DBD::Oracle and DBI need to work together. DBD::Oracle makes the calls to the Oracle API (OCI -Oracle Call Interface or if you like the Oracle Client Software) directly using embedded C. The API talks to the Database and DBD::Oracel and DBI return the results. By the way this is also how all the other programs do it as well. So yes DBD::Oracle could be called ODBC compliant but there is nothing really to be compliant with. The good thing about DBD::Oracle as it uses direct calls to the OCI it is much faster and can take advantage of such Oracle goodies like the Array Interface where you can do bulk uploads in mins rather than hours. By the way you might want to try looking at perl.dbi.dev for future support as few people use this forum.