in reply to DBD retrieve question

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking, but I'll give it a shot. If you want to print values for another column in the table, add a statement like:
print "New column:" . $ref->{'other_column'};

The fetchrow_hashref statement creates a hashref with keys for each column in your original SQL statement. Since you are doing a 'SELECT *' you are getting all columns from that table. You just need to know the name of the column to access.

As a general rule, you probably want to avoid 'SELECT *' in important code since changes to the table may break your code. It's best to just select the specific columns you want/need.