You didn't show the part where you setup the query for $sth. But let's imagine it looked like:

   my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT foo, bar, baz FROM bif");

You could replace that with:

   my @cols = qw(foo bar baz);
   my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT " . join(', ', @cols) . " FROM bif"
+);
[download]

Now, instead of iterating over keys(%$record), just iterate over @cols, in the original order:

   foreach $field (@cols) {

Of course there are lots of other ways to do it, but that's how I'd do it.

-sam