As stated before - perldoc DBI is your friend.

However - for a quick answer - do is great but as previously stated doesn't work with select. If you want to avoid the prepare, execute, fetchrow path you can do:

my ($count) = $dbh->selectrow_array($sql);

# or if you substitute '$data[\d+]' with ? in your sql

my ($count) = $dbh->selectrow_array($sql, {}, @data);
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my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];