Hi Monks!

I am working on this code where I need to send json back to some jQuery code. I would like to know if there is better way of doing this, I mean formatting JSON data. Is there anything that could be done better?
Here is the code sample for your evaluation:

!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use CGI qw(-oldstyle_urls :standard);
use DBI;
use DBD::ODBC;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;

my $q = CGI->new;

my $search = $q->param('search') || "";

my $user = "user";
my $pwd  = "pwd";


my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:ODBC" ,$user ,$pass ,{ PrintError => 0 } )
+ or
                 die "Can not connect to ODBC database: $DBI::errstr\n
+" ;
 
my $sql = qq{SELECT name,city,state from mytable where name like ? lim
+it 5};
my $data_handle = $dbh->prepare($sql);

   $data_handle->execute($search.'%') or die "SQL Error: $DBI::errstr\
+n";

my %returned_data;

while (my $row = $data_handle->fetchrow_hashref()) {

          $returned_data{'name'}  = $row->{NAME};
          $returned_data{'city'}  = $row->{CITY};
          $returned_data{'state'} = $row->{STATE};
 
}

$data_handle->finish;

print $q->header(-type => "application/json", -charset => "utf-8");
my $json = encode_json \%returned_data;
print $json;
[download]

Thanks for looking!