to clarify... it is neccesary when you don' want to retrieve all the data provided by a select statement

If it is necessary in any DBD driver, then it should be considered a bug and reported to the author as such. The only reason to call finish is to free up any temporary database resources that your statement might be using, e.g. a temporary table required for an "order by" clause. As mentioned elsewhere, the DBD itself should be calling finish itself before an execute on an active statement handle. That being said, if you're only fetching one row, you ought to call finish, but it shouldn't be necessary. If that fixes the OP's problem, then there's a bug in the DBD he's using.