Does getting column types at runtime affect MySQL performance?

Question

Here is a question about getting column information. What if ui asks table for all or several columns about theirs types? From first look nothing special just select as answered, but this leads to INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS access which can lead to performance impact, because this table is service in MySQL. Does my assumption about performance is true?

Answer 1

There is a small impact on performance. Suggest you time the request to see if the impact is acceptable. And you should probably design your application to fetch the information only once, not every time you are about to query the table.