From DBI's fetchall_arrayref section:

If called on an inactive statement handle, fetchall_arrayref returns undef.

There may be other stuff in the DBI documentation that may be of interest. Have you read it?

My attempt to reproduce this has failed.

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More tests => 2;
use DBI;
use Data::Dumper;

my $dbh = DBI->connect ('dbi:SQLite:dbname=:memory:', '', '');

my $sth = $dbh->prepare ('SELECT 1 = 1;');
$sth->execute;
$sth->finish;
ok ! $sth->{Active}, 'Handle is inactive';
my $res = $sth->fetchall_arrayref ();

is $res, undef, 'Result is undef' or diag Dumper ($res);

diag "DBI $DBI::VERSION";
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$ perl inactive.t
1..2
ok 1 - Handle is inactive
not ok 2 - Result is undef
#   Failed test 'Result is undef'
#   at /tmp/inactive2.t line 16.
#          got: 'ARRAY(0x2c41050)'
#     expected: undef
# $VAR1 = [];
# DBI 1.643
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 2.
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On this apparently inactive handle it still returns an empty arrayref. Where am I going wrong?

---

🦛

I tried your test using MySQL and it gave the same result. But I checked the handle for errors and it produced "fetch() without execute()". So perhaps returning an empty arrayref is correct, as there was an error. Interesting that SQLite did not throw that error.

You can't do any fetch after calling finish(), I don't think

Thank for trying all that.

In the end, I decided it would just be easier if I checked for null in both places and move on.

checking for undef in the return, and no records when I check the array size

G'day bartender1382,

"After a lot of Googling I am led to believe that it can return a null value ..."

If you show the results of such "Googling", we can comment on what you found.

What DBMS?

What SQL statement?

Where is the code example?

What expected output?