lets say you have

create table BUGS(
bug_id number(20) is primary key,
owner varchar2(50),
subject varchar2(50),
status char(3),
assigned varchar2(8) );

You can use the following to get your table
to a hash of Array and do a sort on which ever column
you like, rather than using ORDER BY.

 my $sth =
  do->("SELECT bug_id, owner, subject, status, assigned FROM BUGS");



while ( 
   my ( $bug_id, $owner, $subject, $status, $assigned ) =
                                $sth->fetechrow ) {
   push @{$bugTable{$bug_id}},
             ( $owner, $subject, $status, $assigned );
}
        

print "Which column would you like to sort by?\n";
print "\t Bug_ID(1), Owner(2), Subject(3) ".
      ", Status(4) or Assigned_To(5) ?: ";

        my $input = ;

   SWITCH: for ($input) {
      /1/ && do {
               @srtArr = sort { $a <=> $b } keys %bugTable;
               last;
            };
      /2/ && do {
               @srtArr =
  sort { ${$bugTable{$a}}[0] cmp ${$bugTable{$b}}[0] } keys %bugTable;
               last;
         };
      /3/ && do {
               @srtArr =
  sort { ${$bugTable{$a}}[1] cmp ${$bugTable{$b}}[1] } keys %bugTable;
               last;
         };
      /4/ && do {
               @srtArr =
  sort { ${$bugTable{$a}}[2] cmp ${$bugTable{$b}}[2] } keys %bugTable;
               last;
         };
      /5/ && do {
               @srtArr =
  sort { ${$bugTable{$a}}[3] cmp ${$bugTable{$b}}[3] } keys %bugTable;
               last;
         };
   } # End of SWITCH.

        for my $bug_id ( @srtArr ) {
                print " @{$bugTable{$bug_id}} \n";
        }