I'll echo their statements again....in all databases I've done perl dbi work in.. .Oracle, MySQL, and Access....they all seemed to have side effects if I didn't explicitly call finish. Remember however that if you call finish before your fetchrow_array call.. that it will fail due to the cursor not being valid. usual flow

$sth = $dbh->prepare($query);
$sth->execute();

while(my @row = $sth->fetchrow_array)
{
   #do stuff
}

$sth->finish();
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