I finally got a chance to try these out. The button widget in the header and surrounding discoveries (like padx -2 and adding the extra column) look like they'll do what I need. I won't be using Perl for the sort - I'll just resubmit a new Mysql query in this case because I have a small database and the result set is limited to 1000.

Tk::DBI::Table looks like it would work for most things and I'll definitely be using it in the future, but it didn't handle my hierarchy quite the way I needed - probably could be solved with some mysql code to set up a unique index field, but I'm not yet familiar enough with mysql to do that.

Many thanks again for the suggestions.