in reply to flushing CGI output

It would appear that you are telling the browser that you are going to be supplying a document of Content-type: text/html. Therefore, if you would like any data to appear in the browser you should print properly formated HTML. 
print <<ENDOFTEXT;
Content-type: text/html\n\n
<HTML>
<HEAD> Some DB Data </HEAD>
<BODY>
......... Database results here .......

[download]
ENDOFTEXT Then don't forget to close the BODY and HTML tags at the end of the document.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom