You might find Data::Dumper useful for examining what data structure you have. Use fetchrow_arrayref() or fetchrow_hashref() (as others have already suggested) so that you only need to address one row at a time.

Read the DBI documentation thoroughly. It's lengthy but it'll save you debugging time, especially if you are new to Perl. Copy the examples carefully; Perl is very intolerant to typos. And remember error checking, even though I didn't here. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use DBI;
use Data::Dumper;

my $Sort = 'bydate';
my %DB;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:Pg:dbname=tilrman');
my $sth = $dbh->prepare('SELECT name,height,width,date FROM foo');

$sth->execute();
while (my $row = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref()) {
  if ($Sort eq 'byname') {
    $DB{$row->[0]} = [ @{$row}[1, 2, 3] ];
  }
  elsif ($Sort eq 'bydate') {
    $DB{$row->[3]} = [ @{$row}[1, 2, 0] ];
  }
}
$sth->finish();
$dbh->disconnect();

print Data::Dumper->Dump([\%DB], ['*DB']);

[download]

In reply to Re: DBI help, aka confused newbie by TilRMan
in thread DBI help, aka confused newbie by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.