The playing with fire thing is exactly what I don't want to do and what I wanted to only execute the query once and pass the statement handle around rather then re-executing it each time I wanted to pull a full set of results from that statement handle. From all things said it looks like I'll have to pass the results to an array ref and pass that around if I don't want to requery each time. I've noticed that even after you've pulled you can still do a rows method and get a full count of rows so I was thinking somehow I would be able to execute some sort of reset and pull a full array ref from it any time you wanted but it looks like that is not the case. Thanks for the help.