Even the most experienced programmer can make this mistake.. on more occasions than I'd care to admit I've accidently specified a $ instead of a \% etc.

For this reason there are two tools available to help protect ourselves.. because odds are you'll do this again (through no intention on your part). They are:

- never, ever give both a scalar and a hash the same name! It's possible and valid to do this but fraught with danger..!

- try using the following bit of code whenever you're not seeing what you expect (I do this all the time):

  { use Data::Dumper; print( Dumper( $dbReturn ) . "\n"; }
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The second tip is what I'll recommend the most, along with pulling out the debugger. I asked my first manager in a software engineering role what his best tip for coding was - and he said "learn to use the debugger". Now that I'm a bit older I know what he meant! Anyway, enough rambling..

PS I think your question was laid out very nicely.. thanks for going to the effort to present a well structured question.