Posted by David Portas on 09/13/05 12:44

I agree with most of what you said. What I mean by "mostly unimportant"
is that for most people most of the time the column order returned by
SELECT * is not important enough to justify the effort and impact of
recreating a table. That's my experience anyway.

> The fact that SQL Server does not provide any simple command to change
> order is no reason to tell people they want the wrong thing.

I don't agree with this. There is good reason to tell people they are
wrong. Implied column ordering is a serious failing of SQL and has lead
to much bad code and incorrect results. I want to discourage anyone
from building column order dependencies into their systems. I would do
so even if SQL Server made it a trivial task to re-order columns - in
fact I'd be even more vocal about it if there were a trivial solution!
I agree that there is a case for physically ordering columns for
support and development purposes but I don't want people to confuse
that service delivery issue with their business's presentational
requirements.

--
David Portas
SQL Server MVP
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