Thank you!

"list" was my disconnect. I tried the direct assignment construct multiple times, before I tried building the string and, every time Dumper out put would look like:

$VAR1 = 'Comments';
$VAR2 = '';
$VAR3 = 'InstallAddID';
$VAR4 = '';
.
.
.
[download]

When what I was expecting was:

Comments = '';
InstallAddID = '';
[download]

So the "X" is "%hash = ($never_gonna_work)" and the "Y" is "Why doesn't Dumper read my mind."

print Dumper(\$po); would have solved my problem.<\p>

Thanks again for the clarity. And this now works.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
use Data::Dumper;
use DBI;

my $dbargs = {AutoCommit => 0,PrintError => 1};
my $dbc = DBI->connect("dbi:SQLite:dbname=da_hrb.db","","",$dbargs);

# get the default po
my $sth = $dbc->prepare('select * from der_po where poid = 0');
$sth->execute;
my $po = $sth->fetchrow_hashref;
# corrected. thanks ikegami
print Dumper($po);
[download]