I am still retrieving the year am i not?

Yes. What's your point? In CDBI, the class represents a complete table, and the object you get back from Class::DBI->retrieve() represents a single row in the database. You can also get a list of objects back from Class::DBI->search() or retrieve_all(). Or you can call either in scalar context and get an iterator that let's you go through the objects, if you like that sort of thing.