As far as getting the column titles out correctly goes, I'd suggest something along the lines of putting as much of your DBI stuff in a single module (an OO one if you like) as possible. That allows you to 'encapsulate' (love that buzzword) your database code. In that module, or elsewhere, you could use the constant pragma to alias column numbers to memorable tags. You'd only have one place you'd have to change, and you'd get the speed advantages of fetchrow_array over fetchrow_hash.

e.g. :

use constant NAME => 2;
use constant ID => 0;
# ...

my @row = $sth->fetchrow_array;
print "Hi, Bob!\n" if $row[NAME] = 'Robert';
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Or some such. Just a thought.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor