Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 07/25/06 10:43

Iain Adams (aca04iba@shef.ac.uk) writes:
> Hey I want to get some data from some tables but I want every field
> except the primary key field returned. Is this possible?
>
> I.e SELECT * (except primary) FROM table1, table2, table3

SELECT col1, col2, col3, ... FROM ...

While SELECT * is handy when running ad hoc-queries, SELECT * should not
be used in production code.

I would also recommand that you only return the columns that the client
actually need. A problem that I often face in our system is to find out
whether where a column is used. Finding which stored procedures is simple,
but if I see a procedure that returns about all columns in the table, I
can't really tell whether the column is actually in use, or if someone added
it just in case.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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