i've just realized there is a much slicker way to repopulate the table each day given that the data is in the same format each time ... the sql statement

"load data infile $foo into $foo_table fields terminated by '/t'"

should be able to do the job without stepping through the input file.

as a result, this should be as simple as preparing and executing the delete statement and then preparing and executing the statement above. i've never had occasion to execute it in this fashion from within perl, but it is one of the standard way to restore a data backup in mysql and works very smoothly from within the mysql client.