Just to be clear: is the line it refers to the print within the while in your example code? If one of the fetched columns is NULL, the variable it is assigned to will be undef.

You can group your my declarations, and you can use map to get rid of undefs:

while ( my( $giName, $gssName, $definition, $sequence ) = map {defined
+ ? $_ : ''} $sth2->fetchrow_array )
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Or you can turn off uninitialized warnings within the while loop:

no warnings 'uninitialized';
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