While working on a script (in Perl), I discovered that MySQL performs very differently depending on the method used to retrieve a data row. What I need to do is walk through a set of 5000+ rows of a table with 110 columns. I have tried four different versions, and instead of elaborating and discussing, I will simply write down the method used and the execution time
Rafael: Thank you very much, I was having a huge headache to solve the very same problem!