From the doc:

              fetchrow_arrayref. Fetches the next row of data and returns it as a list containing the field values.

In your assignment:

$aref = $sth->fetchrow_array;
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You are assigning a list to a scalar. i.e. $aref is a SCALAR .

The next statement, you try to dereference $aref as an array ref.

If you had use warnings; it would say:

       Useless use of a constant (..) in void context at ...

In any case, @$aref is empty.

It would also be helpful to do error checking (RaiseError, or check $sth->err).

If you are confident that the fetchrow_array returns a value, try:

($aref )= $sth->fetchrow_array;
print "GOT |$aref|\n";
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Update:Corrected doc reference from fetchrow_arrayref to fetchrow_array. Thanks McA for pointing this out.