Thank you all for your responses -- they're much more than I expected.

Since this reply seemed to have the most solid ways for checking that my fetchrow_hashref() call was working, I tried the suggestions therein. Sadly, I found that I was getting a valid hashref returned, as:

print "Errors are: $sth->err\n";
print "I got out: ref($rec_ref)\n";
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Gives me:

Errors are: DBI::st=HASH(0xe2478)->err
I got out: ref(HASH(0xf9d14))
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both of which seem to indicate that I do, indeed, have a valid hashref to work with.

To expand on what's going wrong, let me pull out the following bit of code from my program:

if ($rec_ref->{'company'} ne "")        
                {
                %ref = %$rec_ref;
                $found = 1;
                }
        $dbh->disconnect();           

        if ($found) {
                return %rec;
        }
        else {
                return undef;
        }
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I know from the database that there will *always* be a company value returned; thus, I was using that as a sanity-check that my hashref was good. From there, I set a flag on how to return from the subroutine I'm in; if it's good, I return the hash that should be filled by dereference from my hashref, otherwise undef.

What's actuall happening here is that I *am* getting a value for $rec_ref->{'company'} (I've checked that with a print statement), and I know I'm returning a hash -- but the subroutine which uses that hash is acting as if it's empty. That subroutine is known good from other activities within my script, so I won't paste it here.

Further comment upon this expanded code would be greatly appreciated. Again, thanks for all of your help.

Alex Kirk