Thanks for posting this pointer. I was tremendously confused by this question myself... I could've sworn that DBI was architected to avoid this problem. You shouldn't get an entire result set unless you do a "fetchall" of some sort, and if you want to process the set row by row you use a "fetchrow". Just doing an "execute" shouldn't be placing any burden on the client...

This appears to be yet-another mysql gotcha... they do something really lame by default to make their server performance look better.