Dear Monks, as a perl novice I am always looking at best practices to handling/setting up efficient processing. I have got some working code, but I want to add another feature as well as improve this code. After some testing, I know this needs a lot of improvement. I am hoping to get some good tips and would like your help in adding this functionality and make the existing code better. Thank you.

Here's a summary of what it does now:

1. open a dbh and run query1.sql
2. query1.sql should return a value of 1 or 0 (my flags)
3. if flag=0 (pass)
4. if flag=1 (fail), print mesg send it in email

Here's what I want to add:

1. if flag=1 (fails), then run query2.sql
2. query2.sql will have (2) cols of info I need
3. add the contents of query2.sql to body of my email and its output too
4. if dbi handle errors, also add error to the email body as a mesg

I also want to handle the (2) output values for other customized print statements

How do I add, make it flexible to kick off query2.sql? Also, how do I make fetchrow_hashref handle the option of either 1 or 2 col values returned?

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
      $info{dsn},
      $info{db_user},
      $info{db_cred},
      {AutoCommit => 0,
       RaiseError => 0,
       PrintError => 0 }) || die ("Cannot connect: ".$DBI::errstr."\n"
+);
my $flg = get_flg(); 
$dbh->disconnect();

# Check flg
if ($flg == 0 ) {
    send_email("PASS:$flg\n");
    } elsif
      ($flg == 1) {
    #Call to query2.sql here
    send_email("FAIL:$flg\n");
    exit;
};
$dbh->disconnect;

sub get_flg
{
  undef $/;
  open (my $fh, "< query1.sql") or die "error opening this file $!";
  my $sth= $dbh->prepare(<$fh>) ||
      die ("Cannot connect: ".$DBI::errstr."\n");
  $sth->execute;
  close $fh;
  my $row = $sth->fetchrow_hashref;
  $sth->finish;
  return $row->{VAL1};  
  print $row;
}

sub send_email {
    my $message = shift;
    open (MAIL, "|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t") or die "Error opening sendma
+il: $!";
    print MAIL "To: me\@myhost.com\n";
    print MAIL "From: checks";
    print MAIL "Subject: Status Checks\n";
    print MAIL "\n";
    print MAIL $message;
    close MAIL;
}
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