Generally, a good rule of thumb is

• if order is important use an array
• if a 'lookup' is important use a hash

It is possible to combine the two with an array of hashes (AoH). And you can use perl's each to get at the key/value pairs in the hashes.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 1;
$Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;

my @db = (
  {one   => q{red}},
  {two   => q{green}},
  {three => q{blue}},
);

#print Dumper \@db;

for my $rec (@db){
  my ($key, $value);
  while (($key, $value) = each %{$rec}){
    print qq{$key -> $value\n};
  }
}
[download]

produces:

one -> red
two -> green
three -> blue
[download]