in reply to concatenating variables

There are ways to do this but it is generally considered bad practice to do so unless you have no other choice. Consider instead an array.
$lines[0] = "use pricedb"; $lines[1] = "second statement"; for my $sql (@lines) { $dbh->do($sql); # check code here }
That easily lends itself to pulling queries from a file or building queries programmatically. It also means you can have an arbitrary number of lines. I highly suggest getting
Learning Perl
And/Or
The Camel Book
If you are going to be doing any amount of Perl programming, both are very useful. Of course there are lots of online tutorials, too.

                - Ant
                - Some of my best work - (1 2 3)