What about a second table with a key that references the first table. I don't really have enougth information to be of exact assistance but if I had a user and a list associated with that user of arbitrary length I would put a second table in with a primary key unique to that table and a key in both tables that matched the user somehow either the UserID or another ID so that the first table referenced the first and all that needed to be done is push the results from a fetchrow_array into an array with a loop. Then delete from the second table all records having that key when you need to get rid of them. If you want to do that after a certain time MySQL has a time function or store the epcoh time from perl as a field and then use that as part of the SQL query. Good Luck