Michael

With respect, this is not a good enough reason to use SELECT * - I'll try to explain why.

The main danger is that at some future time, someone (perhaps not you) will add a BLOB column to one of your tables. If this happens, your code as is could blithely start dragging this data across a network. I don't know MySQL so well, but in SQL Server this could be anything up to about 2GB, perhaps more. Plenty enough to provoke the wrath of most Network Administrators.

You might be lucky - your code could fail due to some exceeded limit, or you might be unlucky - your code could work, and quietly start a mammoth data transfer.

If you really have your heart set on your current approach, you might want to consider thinking about a maximum limit to the amount of data returned in a column, and then explicitly set this limit with code similar to this:

    $dbh->{LongReadLen}=1024*200;  # Max size of column data
    $dbh->{LongTruncOk}=0;         # Not OK to truncate data
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Which is why DBI drivers should default the LongReadLen value to some reasonable amount (DBD::Sybase defaults it to 32K as that is the normal default for Sybase connections), and I see that the DBI manual actually states that the default should be 0, meaning "do not fetch BLOB columns" (and made me realize that DBD::Sybase does not behave correctly when LongReadLen is set to 0...)

Michael