Accessing Database values from [perl]

[Handytman@aol.com]

I am attempting to use [perl] to check my shopping cart for items that are 
out of stock (checking the cart against the Inventory database.) The 
$Safe{items} is well explained. What I cannot find is how to chack an 
arbitrary database, key, field combination from Perl. I found, in the mailing 
list, something called database_field($database, $key, $field), but I cannot 
get this to work, and it isn't in the docs. Is it for real? Or is there 
another way?

Thank you very much,
Rob Maurer