Got a problem here that it seems to me that there should be an elegent solution to, but darned if I can find it..

I have an order entry system written in Perl/DBI/MySQL, and within this system I often need to create new queries based on the results of previous ones. The problem is, I don't have an elegant way of determining if a SELECT statement came back with 0 results. The best I've been able to come up with is to read all of the rows of results into an array of arrays, determine if that array is empty or not, and then continue processing if it isn't. The problem here, of course, is that it takes up a heck of a lot of memory (not something you want when 20 reps are going to be using it simultaneously), and is ugly to work with (and probably horrific for someone else to maintain)

Does anyone have an idea of how I can do this better? I know that when I submit queries directly in MySQL's client, I get extra data like:
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)
or
Empty set (0.26 sec)
All I'm looking for is a way to access this data from Perl.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.