This guide will require admin rights on your mac and assumes some understanding of the terminal. Instead we will install a new version of Perl using Perlbrew a Perl installation management tool. As for ActiveState they do not currently support DBD::mysql on OSX. Apple never developed a package management tool that works well with Perl libraries and so upgrades carry a level of risk.
There are alternatives to this methodology involving supplementing the stock OSX Perl with extra libraries or using ActiveState for OSX. Over the past 4 years I have had to do this quite a number of times and thought it best to share my personal best practice. Over the past few months a number of users have asked us how to install Ensembl and its dependencies on OSX.
