I am not using any abstraction... just pure DBI. And, I have done nothing to turn on the async feature. In fact, now your reply has confused me even more, as you seem to imply that I might have that feature on, and that I have to try and turn it off. I thought it was just the other way around.

I am making Ajax calls. It could be that Dancer, which tends to use a lot of global cars, is causing this problem. But, these calls are to separate Starman instances, albeit on the same computer, and they are making separate calls the the db, albeit, the same db.

addendum: the above note is confusing, so I would appreciate some explanation. Wouldn't it be normal to first execute and then fetch? After all, that is how my code is written. As I said above in my OP, Perl doesn't just jump over lines of code. So, the only conclusion I can derive is that one call to the db is made, and before the db can respond to it, another call comes in. The db gets confused, and tries to fetch (from the first call) on the second call that hasn't executed yet. This would imply that there is namespace pollution going on... vars from different web calls are clobbering each other.