First of all: you're not using MySQL...you're using dbi::DBM. Or basically DBM file format with dbi, dbi being an abstraction layer that allows access to different kinds of "databases" with standard SQL. Secondly, if you tell the database to create table 100 times, it will create 100 tables, which will depend on the exact database as to how many actual system files it creates. It's good that you're hacking some code and trying to get it to do what you want -- but without a basic understanding of databases and their underlying concepts, you will be forever confused as to how you're supposed to store/retrieve the data. Don't mean to be mean or anything with what i said...but I do think that you'd seriously benefit from a basic database and dbi tutorial