Thanks John, I was able to come up with something that works about the same (though a little clunky) by passing column names to the fetchall_arrayref function. Should someone search out this email in the future, the solution was to wildcard the SELECT statement and use the following feature as documented in DBI:
#### From the DBI pod: To fetch only the fields called "foo" and "bar" of every row as a hash ref (with keys named "foo" and "BAR", regardless of the original capitalization): $tbl_ary_ref = $sth->fetchall_arrayref({ foo=>1, BAR=>1 }); #### Thanks again! On Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 1:57 PM, John R Pierce <pie...@hogranch.com> wrote: > On 11/24/2013 10:05 AM, dome stuff wrote: > >> >> $1 contains a comma delimited list of column names. >> >> I can run the query on the CLI and it works. If I swap the question mark >> that is $1 in the query, with a static column list, the query works in >> perl. Presumably I should be able to pass a column list as a variable when >> preparing a statement, but apparently I'm not getting the type correct? >> > > You are not supposed to be able to do that in SQL. parameters can only > be used for data values, not field names or other statement components. > > -- > john r pierce 37N 122W > somewhere on the middle of the left coast > >