This is the code from one of the clients used in the post "Statistics on getting a random row from a table" to check for the quickest way to access a random row.

It does nothing but reading a thousand random rows, I hope it's enough for you to learn how to access MySQL databases using Perl and use it as a quickstart for your own scripts.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use DBI;
use DBD::mysql;

$platform = "mysql";
$database = "database";
$host = "server_ip";
$port = "3306";
$user = "user";
$pw = "12345";

$dsn = "dbi:$platform:$database:$host:$port";

$connect = DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $pw);

for ($i=0; $i<1000; $i++)
{
    $query = "SELECT COUNT(1) AS total FROM bench_myisam";
    $query_handle = $connect->prepare($query);
    $query_handle->execute();

    $query_handle->bind_columns(\$total);

    if ($query_handle->fetch())
    {
        $rand = int(rand($total));

        $query = "SELECT id FROM bench_myisam LIMIT 1 OFFSET $rand";
        $query_handle = $connect->prepare($query);
        $query_handle->execute();

        $query_handle->bind_columns(\$id);
        $query_handle->fetch();
    }  
}