This is kind of a strange question. The initial creation puts the DB (well, the top level access to it) into a scalar. Scalars only live as long as the script and its scope though so if you want the DB to persist you will have to write it to disk and if you're doing that you should probably never use :memory: at all but just pick your DB file name and connecting using that. DBI objects (the top level scalar in this case) don't auto-serialize and the top level does not contain the DB data in a way you can flatten (without fantastic contortions anyway). You need the SQLite DBD driver to do that for you.