I think you want to check if a table is empty, not a database, since the code you present seems to be an attempt at that. Try looking at the following code snippet, and see if it makes sense. I didn't add any error checking here, since it's just an example of the concept. The key here is COUNT(*) which is an optimized (at least in MySQL) way to get a row count on a table. HTH.

my $table = "foo";

my $sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $table";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql);
$sth->execute;

my ($count) = $sth->fetchrow_array;

if ($count)
{
    print "$table has $count rows!\n";
}
else
{
    print "$table is empty\n";
}
[download]