it'll take wayy long to load.

There are a couple of tricks you can use to start displaying tabular data before the entire table is generated (which can, as you note, take a long time). The big trick is to break the big table up into multiple smaller ones. (You'll have to but them right up against each other to avoid blank lines between them.) The browser will display each table as soon as it can, which will be soon unless you're wrapping things into an even bigger table. To make this trick work, you'll need to specify widths for each cell. This means streaming more data to the browser, but that's the trade-off you have to accept for getting a quicker initial display.

Give it a try, and see if you quick quicker seeming results. If it works, consider sticking with whichever approach yields the more maintainable code. To my eye, it's the fetchall_arrayref.