If I were going to use that approach, I would almost certainly drop the bind_columns altogether and do:

while(my $columns = $sth->fetchrow_hashref) {
    print "<tr><td>$columns->{name}</td><td>$columns->{price}</td></tr
+>\n";
    print "<tr><td colspan=\"2\">$columns->{description}</td></tr>\n";
}
[download]

But I'm trying to avoid that. Primarily, I asked this question in hopes of learning a bit more about hard references.

Thanks for your help. :-)

Alakaboo