Since you have your answer already, I'll instead give a couple of small suggestions that you might use to simplify your code. Have a look at the selectcol_arrayref method in DBI. It will simplify your code quite a bit

my $opts = $dbh->selectcol_arrayref(<<"");
  SELECT DISTINCT market
    FROM table
   ORDER BY market ASC

print qq{<select name="market" size="1">};
print map { qq{<option value="$_">$_</option>\n} } @$opts;
print qq{</select>};
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Also, this is one of the few cases where the HTML generation utilities in CGI.pm can come in handy:

print $q->popup_menu(-name => 'market',
                     -size => 1,
                   -values => $opts);
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