First, you'd want to read up on the DBI calls selectall_hashref and selectall_arrayref which can come in really handy for things like this. The statement handle equivalents are fetchall_hashref and fetchall_arrayref, of course.

my $hash = $dbh->selectall_arrayref("SELECT id,name,age FROM foo",
                                    "id");
[download]

The catch is that selectall_hashref needs a key field to use as the hash key, so these have to be unique. If you don't have a unique column, you can use the alternative array fetch method and make do, or something like this:

# ...
my @rows;
$sth->execute();

while (my $row = $sth->selectrow_hashref())
{
     push(@rows, { %$row });   # Force unique reference
}
[download]