If you use fetchrow_array() like that then if there are one or more rows returned then the first one is lost, because you threw it away in the if().

Why not do something like:

my $found = 0;
while(my @row = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
   ++$found;
   ... process @row ...
}
if(!$found) {
    ... no rows found ...
}
[download]

As for using $sth->rows(), the problem is that for most database engines the number of rows affected by a SELECT query can only be determined once all of the rows have been fetched...

Michael