I could be that DBD::Oracle does not support that portion of DBI. I've seen simliar things with DBI/DBD in the past. I searched through the DBD::Oracle documentation and found no mention of it not supporting this feature however.

You might also want to note that fetchrow_array is faster than fetchrow_hashref. If you looking for speed it might be better to stay with what is working now, despite the increase in code complexity.

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Frank Wiles <frank@wiles.org>
http://frank.wiles.org