If you only care about the first match, try exiting the loop as soon as you find the match, that should save time. Also, if you know which keys will be found most often, you might want to try to match them first instead of relying on the return order of the 'keys' function.

while($cur_line=<fh_log>) 
{ 
   foreach $key (keys %hash) 
   { 
      $table = $hash{$key}[0]; 

      #If this query contains reference to this table 
      if($cur_line=~ m/$table/i) 
      {     
          #count up how many times this table is referenced. 
      $table_stats{$table}++; 
      $table_refs++;     #total table references (for % calc) 
      last; #added to exit inner loop upon match
      } 
   }
}

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.