Thanks, davido, I ended up with this in my final app:

while ($row = $sth->fetchrow_array()) {
    push (@categories, $row);
}
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I guess fetchrow and fetchall we appropriately named ;^) Now, I wish there were a fetchcol that just retrived a known column of a given row (intersection, so selectcol_arrayref wouldn't work) so I don't have to do:

$single_value = $categories[0];
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after the fetch, and could just do:

$single_value = $sth->fetchcol_justone;
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You have to build the column into your SQL statement. The first statement here will select all columns.

SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE age = ?
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And this will select just one column:

SELECT firstname FROM mytable WHERE age = ?
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In the case of the second SQL statement, fetchrow_array() will return an array of one single element.

There is a pretty good basic SQL tutorial at http://www.w3schools.com/sql/default.asp.

Another alternative is the $slice parameter of the fetchall_arrayref() method. By passing an anonymous arrayref containing the element numbers you're after, you can "slice" the arrayref for each row so that only certain columns are seen. This is documented in DBI.




Dave