I figured that either MySQL was not passing table names back through the DBI or DBI has no interface for the table name of columns. I agree it would be more portable to use "SELECT a.id as a_id ..." but it would have been nice to use "SELECT * ..." and keep the metadata in the DB. My SELECT stmts are dynamically generated; i'll just have keep the metadata around to generate the "a.id as a_id" aliases. Thanks.