During a support session we needed to retrieve all field configurations in one go. So we use SQL to extract the data directly from the database
SQL for MySQL
SELECT customfield.id, customfield.cfname, f.id, f.fieldid, g.datakey, g.xmlvalue FROM customfield JOIN fieldconfiguration f ON f.fieldid = concat('customfield_',customfield.id) join genericconfiguration g on g.datakey = f.id where g.xmlvalue like '%gd.columns%'