Have a look at the "catalog" functions of DBI. They return the database type of columns for a given query.

Thanks for the quick reply Corion! I went through those functions and if I understood correctly, they would return the datatype as a number representing their ISO counerpart. Is it possible to see the actual Sybase datatype (instead of number)?

You could certainly translate them yourself:

First, create your translation table (ficticious data, of course):

my %translation_table = (
        1=>"bool",
        27=>"char",
        13=>"dec",
        34=>"nul",
        55=>"etc...",
    );
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Then, using the value from catalog functions, select and then print (or say) the appropriate data-type-word to your output.

I think you need DBI::Const::GetInfoType for that mapping.

(that's for 1.10 which is what I happened to have in my brower cache - but should work with any reasonably recent version of DBD::Sybase)

Michael