By the way: One advantage that an object might have over a plain hash is that typos in the column names cause errors. However, you can get that effect even with a hash, with the core module Hash::Util:

$ perl -wMstrict
use Hash::Util qw/lock_keys/;
my $row = { foo=>3, bar=>7 };
lock_keys %$row;
print "$$row{foo}\n";
print "$$row{bsr}\n";
__END__
3
Attempt to access disallowed key 'bsr' in a restricted hash at - line 
+5.
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