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157 columns in a table is not good database design - it makes maintenance / reporting / analysis very difficult no matter whether you are using perl or anything else.
I would normally be concerned with any more than 30 columns in a table - then I would look to see if I could split into two or more tables.
You may possibly lose a very small amount of performance speed having to join the tables when you retrieve the data but it does make things infinitely more maintainable