Wow. I am impressed with so many wisdom in such a short time! Thank you very much for all your submissions.
Apart from placing the $db handler only once in the script (thus outside the sub) and the destroyer, cLive ;-) recommends making my own copy of the hash data structure and return that.

Perlplexer thinks about returning an array but i really like the hash way of working with this data.

Supermonkey mey mean that since i do not disconnect or destroy my $sth, i can still get the data from it so i won't have to copy it? That could be a great solution. I am going to try it all out. Thank you very much.