Maintaining a Cache of Hash References

[Tomasi, Chuck]

I'm trying to maintain a cache of hashes to reduce database hits.  What I
want is to determine if I've retrieved the data from the DB before, if so,
just pass back the copy of information used last time, otherwise read it
from the DB and make a note of it.  It would seem I'm not copying the
information in to the $user arg properly.  Something like this:

@UserCache;     # Place to store data already seen
sub GetUser
{
        my ($id, $user)=@_;     # record number and hash reference to
populate

        if (defined($UserCache[$id])) {

        $user = $UserCache[$id];                                            
        return(1);                                                          
        }


        # Code here to read info from the database and put it in $user as
necessary

        # Store the info from the DB for later
        $UserCache[$id] = $user;

        return 1;
}

I've verified $user gets populated properly when data comes from the
database (fields are populated individually) and I've also verified that
data is being stored in @UserCache properly on subsequent hits, but it isn't
getting from $UserCache[$id] in to $user as expected and I don't know why.
Do I need to fill up $user fields individually when retrieving from the
cache?  Has anyone done anything like this before?

Thanks

--Chuck