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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