[GENERAL] How to get many data at once?

Hi, if I have such a table:

t_ref_id     t_data
--------------------
1             'abc'
2             '321'
1             'ddd'
2             'xyz'
9             '777'
...


I want to get data with a special t_ref_id:

SELECT t_data FROM THETABLE WHERE t_ref_id = '1';

I must use a while loop to extract the data (I'm using PHP):

$rows = array();
while (($row = pgsql_fetch_assoc($result) !== false) {
    $rows[] = $row;
}

And if there are many matched rows, such as many hundreds or thousands of rows, I think such a loop maybe inefficient.

How to do this in a more efficient way?

Thank you!



--
ddh