One thing you could do to speed things up is to let SQL do what it is good for. For example, say your $data->[10] row is called 'database'. Then get SQL to remove everything that has 'tempdb' in it with a WHERE database NOT LIKE '%tempdb%'. And also, if your list of keywords to search for are never actually regexes, just a list of keywords, then you can add something like:

WHERE database NOT LIKE '%tempdb%'
  AND (
       keyword LIKE '%create%'
    OR keyword LIKE '%delete%'
    OR keyword LIKE '%insert%'
    ...
  )
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I would achieve that by some code like this probably.

my @patterns = qw/create delete insert update drop/;
my $query = "@sqlstatement"; # don't know what you already have in @sq
+lstatement though
$query .= qq{WHERE database NOT LIKE '%tempdb%';
$query .= qq{AND (};
$query .= join " OR ",
            map { qq{keyword LIKE '%$_%'} }
              @patterns;
$query .= qq{)};

sth=$dbh->prepare( $query );
$sth->execute;
while ($data = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref()) {
   # the query did all of our checking, so we don't need to check anyt
+hing.
   print "$data->[3] $data->[9] $data->[10] $data->[13]\n";
}
[download]

    -Bryan