You can move your open and $~ statements out the while loop. Saves you execution time. It is more clear to name the filehandle and the format identical:

open NEWDATA, ">>newdata.txt" or die "Can't append to newdata.txt: $!"
+;
format NEWDATA
.....#stuff goes here
.

write NEWDATA while( @data = $query->fetchrow );
close NEWDATA;
[download]

See perlform for more about formats. (The formats are a case apart. Different namespace and so on.)

Hope this helps,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)