mentioned - it depends, and without knowing more about your application it's really hard to say. Off-hand I'd wager that you are trying to optimize something that will only have very little effect on the actual run-time of your program - the difference between fetching one column and fetching four isn't likely to be hugely significant. If you have run-time problems they are likely to be elsewhere (such as incorrect indexes on the tables, or incorrect algorithms in your perl code)