Except I want to sort for handle-caching purposes. It doesn't count as the same handle if keys/values are in a different order, so I sort. No, I'm not sure if the benefit of caching outweights the cost of sorting. I'll let someone else benchmark. Probably depends on the database anyway :)

Update:Umm, I DID use prepare_cached :) DBI won't do the hard work for me, though, unless I make sure the statement stays the same. And the statement won't stay the same unless I sort the field names (DBI's prepared_cached uses the entire SQL statement as a hash key). It also helps, though, to keep statements the same so that the db itself (well, some db's) can cache the statement w/o re-parsing the statement over several executions of the same script (not as efficient as perl/DBI caching, but every bit helps.

I did not know you could do that join that way w/o map though :)