Sounds like you have a working solution, but there is still a lot of good advice from the monks above to apply. You could also stop unwanted entries from entering the @recordset array in the first place. For instance you can use a hash to keep track of which items have seen their "exit":

my @recordset;
my %exit;
while ( my @event = fetchrow_array() ) {
    $exit{ $event[2] } = 1 if $event[1] eq 'exit';
    push @recordset, [ @event ] unless $exit{ $event[2] };
}
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