Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 09/15/05 00:22

Greg D. Moore (Strider) (mooregr_deleteth1s@greenms.com) writes:
> I can see your point of view (and often wish in EM I could see columns in
> the order I want) but to a point have to disagree with it.
>
> Let me pull a Celko here, but I think getting into the mindshift of
> thinking of a table and realizing that order of columns should not be a
> physical attribute of the table.
>
> The minute folks assume they are, they start accepting code like select
> * from bar and assuming that * will return columns in a specific manner.
> This burned us on a code change a year or so ago where due to the way
> the schema was changing (partly due to replication) the order of the
> columns DID in fact change and of course the programmers who wrote the
> code in the height of the dotcom era saved 30 seconds (or about 2 days
> "internet time" :-) by typing * instead of a proper column list.
>
> This was fine for 3-4 years until suddenly production code on a high
> volume website broke.

Yes, SELECT * does not belong in application code. (Unless it's some
simple throw-away thing like keep track of the local sports club.)

Just like, it is not good practice to call a routine (be that a C++
function of stored procedure) with 20 parameters with positional actual
parameters. Yet, few would argue that it's a good idea to have the
parameters in random order.


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

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

[Back to original message]