I give *little* regard for performance (in this case), and everything for my *expectations* and *documentation*. I could care less if it's faster or not. I care more about clarity. David Metzler wrote:
Although there are merits in this argument, I wouldn't classify it as a bug. There's a lot of generic/abstracted data loading, and as long as there's code at there that dynamically adds columns, select * actually is the sanest way to do things.
Also, the performance costs are database dependent. Mysql may work one way, but other db's work another. Any DB with precompiled cached queries is not going to carry significant parsing overhead. The amount of data transfered in most cases is dependent on the size of the data in the column and not the number of columns. So in some tables it may make sense. You might get the name of the image file in drupal, but you're not likely to get the image.
Finally in my experience, most database performance problems lie in what is in the WHERE or JOIN, and not what's in the column list.
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