If you want to know which is the ID of the last INSERT been made from the current connection, when auto_increment is active, use this: SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID(); A few lines in non-optimized perl: my $sel_last = "SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID();"; my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sel_last) or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr; $sth->execute() or die "Couldn't execute statement: " . $sth->errstr; my @data; while (@data = $sth->fetchrow_array()) { print "Last ID was.... $data[0]"; } More details here for the MySQL statement and here for the perl DBI .