really? I wish I had time to play with it right now...
If I understand you correctly, you can the same functionality, that is, an array of hashes, from

 
my $result_ref = $l_sth->fetchall_arrayref({})
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You can then do things like $$result_ref[0]{field} the above two lines are from code running on production machine; I know it works because my pager is too quiet for it to be otherwise.
But for 1.15's fetchall_hashref, I haven't looked yet. Must play later.