Perl 5.6 includes support for JPL. JPL is a package, which allows you to
invoke Java in Perl as well as embed Perl in java. So in theory you could
access an image/sql database via jdbc from Perl. I've never tried it but
would be interesting to try.
More info on JPL can be found at
http://www.seas.smu.edu/~jodea/links_for_jpl_and_perl.htm
Regards,
Ernest Hill