If there is a method that tells you that no more results are available (e.g. with sybase), just check it before you fetch the data (e.g. before the while-loop) to find out if there is no data returned

Actually that's not quite right.

DBD::Sybase's syb_more_results attribute will be TRUE until the first fetch been called, even if no rows are returned by a query - so you can't use that attribute (or DBI's upcoming mre_results() method) to check for zero length result sets.

Michael