Personally I prefer to do the sorting in Oracle:

$sql = "SELECT ss_number,
               last_name || ' ' || first_name NAME
        FROM people
        ORDER BY 2";
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and using

$people_hash{$people_array[0]} = $people_array[1];
push @people_keys,$people_array[0];
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to populate the local storage structures.
Just a matter of style, really. I haven't done any benchmarking, but Oracle Corp spends a lot of money writing code to make sorting effecient :)

rdfield