I can't see anything in your code that should produce the error you are getting. Are you using the latest SQL::Statement (it's the SQL engine that DBD::CSV uses)? One possible culprit is non-printing characters in the file. I suggest you update your SQL::Statement if needed - latest is 1.14 and then try the same script but add in a section that uses SQL CREATE and INSERT to create and populate the table so that DBD::CSV both creates and parses it. If you continue to have problems, please email me directly (I'm the maintainer of DBD::CSV and SQL::Statement and my email's in the pod of those modules) '