The DBI docs also have a written-out example for that, giving you the advantage of speed combined with the ease of hash access, something like:

my %rec;
my $sth = $dbh->prepare ("select region, sales from sales_by_region");
   $sth->execute;
   $sth->bind_columns (\(@rec{@{$sth->{NAME_lc}}}));
while ($sth->fetch) {
    print "$rec{region}: $rec{sales}\n";
    }
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