i dont think it was that column_info() itself was slower, but the processing required on the output of it to get an array of column names probably was...this was the original snippet (with jhourcle's improvement of using map()):

my $sth = $dbh->column_info( undef, $db, $table, '%');
my $ref = $sth->fetchall_arrayref;
my @cols = map { $_->[3] } @$ref;
[download]