Is there any reason to worry about the column order in a table?

Question

I know you can ALTER the column order in MySQL with FIRST and AFTER, but why would you want to bother? Since good queries explicitly name columns when inserting data, is the

Answer 1

No, the order of the columns in a SQL database table is totally irrelevant - except for display / printing purposes. There's no point in reordering columns - most systems don't even provide a way to do that (except dropping the old table and recreating it with the new column order).

Marc

EDIT: from the Wikipedia entry on relational database, here's the relevant portion which to me clearly shows that column order should never be of concern:

A relation is defined as a set of n-tuples. In both mathematics and the relational database model, a set is an unordered collection of items, although some DBMSs impose an order to their data. In mathematics, a tuple has an order, and allows for duplication. E.F. Codd originally defined tuples using this mathematical definition. Later, it was one of E.F. Codd's great insights that using attribute names instead of an ordering would be so much more convenient (in general) in a computer language based on relations. This insight is still being used today.