You need to understand what an array reference is - it is a reference to an array so if you have $ary_ref = $sth->fetchrow_arrayref(), you need to dereference that (turn it into a regular array) with, for example print "@$ary_ref". As for selectall(), it is not doing a select *on* an arrayref, it is doing a select *into* an arrayref, in other words the results will be dumped into the arrayref. $sql is a SQL query string such as "SELECT myCol FROM myTable WHERE ...", the {} is an empty attribut hashref (you can just put it in as-is for now), and @binds is an array of the placeholder bind parameters. If you don't have any placeholders you can just omit the {} and the @binds. See the DBI docs under selectall_arryref() for details.