If you use Ubuntu, you can install binary package as follows:

$ . /etc/lsb-release
$ sudo wget http://code.joyfulworker.org/apt/sources.list.d/$DISTRIB_CODENAME.list \
                        --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/joyfulworker.list
$ sudo apt-get --allow-unauthenticated update
$ sudo apt-get install jw-dbi

To build from source, you need CMake and Qt. That's about it. Here is the whole process for Ubuntu:

bash $ git clone git://github.com/jw/dbi.git
bash $ cd dbi
bash $ dpkg-build -d
bash $ sudo dpkg -i ../jw-dbi_0.0.1-1~karmic_amd64.deb

If you don't have Ubuntu, here is the manual build process:

bash $ git clone git://github.com/jw/dbi.git
bash $ cd dbi
bash $ cmake .
bash $ make
bash $ sudo make install