Responding to Roy Fulbright's message as above: After successfully setting up a connection to my DAC port in a manner similar to yours I noted in the SQL Server 2008 R2 documentation under "Using a Dedicated Administrator Connection" the following:
"SQL Server Express does not listen on the DAC port unless started with a trace flag 7806." Otherwise, my connection string looked like: my $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:Driver={Sql Server native Client 10.0};" . "Server=ims\\ims_test;" . "port=50564;UID=$uid;PWD=$pwd",{ AutoCommit => 1, RaiseError => 0, PrintError => 0 }) Also, if you go to SQLServerCentral.com and put 'dbnetlib' and 'DAC' in the search box, a number of threads with useful info come up. Hope that helps Roy, Steve Moreland