Is there an easier way to do this with static variables?

Question

I have some old code where I took functions like this:

function getDataPlain() {
  $theArray = fetchFromDb("select * from tablename");
  return $theArray;
}

and converted them to use static like this:

function getDataStaticVersion() {
  static $theArray;
  if (isset($theArray)) {
    return $theArray;
  }
  else {
    $theArray = fetchFromDb("select * from tablename");
    return $theArray;
  }
}

Then, if the method was called more than once it would only hit the database once. This works well but I'm wondering if there's a cleaner way to do this with less code that has to be written in each function. (I have a number of functions like this that I'd like to convert to the static version)