Why is there a 255 field limit in MATLAB Database toolkit?

I am durrently using MATLAB 2012b. A while back, I noticed that queries that should have returned more than 255 columns only return the first 255, with no error.

You might point out that no actual database table should have that many fields (have you never even heard of normalization?). But I'm frequently staging hourly data (so 8760 or so values a year) by thousands of columns in a spreadsheet. To pull that in via database toolkit, I am forced to define multiple named ranges (each with less than 255 columns), and issue multiple queries, instead of a single named range and query.

I guess this could be a limitation of the Microsoft ODBC drivers, or of the ODBC spec in general?