Thanks to all, for all the help (I have been learning perl for a couple of months - all prior work procedural, and like it). I did not realise I would need to bless slices of an array to. I don't want to move the sql statement outside of the package so it calls the bless function six times (correct me if I am wrong) but have it all contained (except the where part of the query) in the package. So I followed your code, changing

return bless \@objref, $class;
to
$self = [@objref];
return bless $self, $class;

and changed the sub to 
sub get_desc()
 {
  my ($self, $idx) = @_ ;
  return $self->[$idx]{_description} ;
 }
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calling code from

my $item = Item::Item->new( "10056" );
print $item->get_desc(0), "\n";
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it works!. However when I try the next entry (the sql statement returns 6 rows)

my $item = Item::Item->new( "10056" );
print $item->get_desc(1), "\n";
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I get: Use of uninitialized value in print at testitem.pl line 17. In my while statement I assign each row to the $objref[$i++] slice. The $self = [@objref] should have the whole array reference (handle ? - not sure) and so why does it not work? More reading to do...

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