References and memory efficiency

Hi there, I've been working on a database wrapper class for a while now, MySQL to be specific. Until now, I've simply had a fetch function that returned an array of all the rows that the database returned, only because I have gotten so tired of always writing the same while loop to iterate through all the rows. However, I have discovered that the method I'm using, passing around large multidimensional arrays of text by copy, is extremely memory inefficient, so I am working on a new method. Tell me if this is any better: Rather than using something like:

    $sql = 'SELECT text, date, etc FROM news WHERE blah=\'foo\'';

    if (!$myquery = $db->query($sql)) { echo 'uh oh'; }
    if (!$db->numrows($myquery)) { echo 'no rows found'; }

    $news = $db->fetchNews($myquery);

I could do something like:

    $news = array();
    $db->fetch($myquery, $news);

Where fetch($query, &$array) is the header. In the second case, the fetch function would therefore write the rows directly to the array which was passed as a reference rather than returning a copy. Am I right in thinking that this is a better method? Should I shut up and do a while loop? Thanks, Joachim