You don't give a whole lot of information, so it's a little hard to give a good answer. However:

The official DBI way of doing this might look like this:

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("select name from file_table where <some condi
+tion>");
my $upd_sth = $dbh->prepare("update file_table set timestamp = ? where
+ name = ?");

while(my $d = $sth->fetch) {
    # do the upload, etc;
    # if all is well:
    $sth_upd->execute(time, $d->[0]);
}
[download]

Note that some database servers may open a second connection for you anyway when creating the second statement handle..

Depending on the database server there may be different ways of doing this, as well.

Michael