[development] Is "SELECT * FROM ..." ok?

[Morbus Iff]

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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