Before you get too sidetracked, you might want to look at the DBI call selectall_hashref() which returns a hash based on a key field.

As to your references being overwritten, here is an example of the wrong way:

my @foo;
my %bar;
while ($sth->fetch())
{
     @bar{'name','age'} = ($name, $age);
     push (@foo, \%bar);
}
[download]

This uses the same hash each time, so your array actually contains duplicates. In your example you are declaring it specifically each time, so each %fetch2 is unique. Summary: Declared inside means unique, outside means recycled.

s/\?+/\?/g;   # BTW