Benefits Of Using SQL Ordinal Position Notation?

Question

Background Information

Ordinal position notation, AKA ordinals, is column shorthand based on the column order in the list of columns in the SELECT cla

Answer 1

Often times when I'm querying a table with a lot of columns (in ad-hoc-land just for data exploration... I would never code like this for a PROD environment) I do something like this to get fields I care about close together:

select top 1000
  Col_1, Col_18, Col_50, Col_117, *
from
  TableWithTonsOfCols
order by
  1, 4 desc, 3

If I said order by Col_1, Col_117 desc, Col_50 my query would barf because the statement wouldn't know which columns I meant to order by due to the " * " doubling up. Not very common, but still a useful feature.