From: Peter Anderson

 

I have a module that uses quite a few variables and would like to remove them in my hook_uninstall() function, but I don't want to have to list them all manually...

I see three ways to do this:
1 - Run variable_del() for each variable manually
2 - List all variables then remove the ones that start with my module's name
3 - Delete variables directly from the database that start with my module's name

I'm obviously trying to avoid #1.
I've used #2 before (http://drupalbin.com/18718) but am worried about the possible performance implications of running a foreach() on every variable in Drupal... Is this good or not?
I'd prefer not to resort to using SQL to delete variables from the database directly as in #3, but this may be the only recommended option...