i've seen the error of my ways. my intent was to create a hash out of the values of the key column from one of my tables. a combination of weariness and the lateness of the day on friday prevented me from seeing the arrayref notation in the ptkdb window, contributing to my misunderstanding. i've constructed the hash by looping through the table and assigning the key to the hash ... all is now hunky-dory. i intend to further enhance my understanding at some point by playing around with other ways to do this, but i'm going to wait for a time at which i perceive that i have a karmic debt to mitigate.