The keys of hashes are returned in seemingly-random order. That's normal. You can either keep track of the keys in an array, sort them, or use Tie::IxHash to preserve the order.

Or did you mean the columns on the actual web page randomly change order? That'd be odd to say the least. Oh, yeah, you do. Wow.

Mech is still the best choice, but you'll have to read the table headers to find the name of the column before you store it in your database I guess. There's a lot of choices for parsing the $mech->content: XML::XPath is my favorite, HTML::TreeBuilder might be helpful, and there's like 12 others.