With 40ms ping common sense is that it will take a bit more to fetch data. So let's say 50ms to fetch one record. With 45.000 records multiplied with 50ms per record it comes to total of 2.250.000 ms = 2.250 sec = 37.5 minutes. Which matches your 'half an hour' description. Same calculation for 5000 records comes to 4.1 minute.

First thing that I would do is to place print "Point X at: " . time(); on a couple of places (change X with 1, 2, 3 ... so you know what point in code it is) and try to figure out what exactly is going on - kind of simple code profiling. Just to make sure something isn't wrong in the prepare() stage. Though it looks like you already checked that.

Second thing would be to actually not fetch data that you don't need (as someone wrote, filter those that you don't need with something like WHERE whatever IS NOT NULL - or whatever you are doing in get_data and Oracle/PlSQL uses) and not bind $valreal and $colorder that I don't see you are using.

Actually I wouldn't bind the things at all - I would just do my $raResults = $sth2->fetchall_arrayref(); which will give you back exactly the same data structure you are building in that while(fetch){} loop (though depends on what get_data is returning) and it should fetch data much faster then one by one. If you need to do some transformation with each row (which I don't see you are doing) - just do it in the get_data itself.