Which is faster/best? SELECT * or SELECT column1, colum2, column3, etc

Question

I\'ve heard that SELECT * is generally bad practice to use when writing SQL commands because it is more efficient to SELECT columns you specificall

Answer 1

If you need every column then just use SELECT * but remember that the order could potentially change so when you are consuming the results access them by name and not by index.

I would ignore comments about how * needs to go get the list - chances are parsing and validating named columns is equal to the processing time if not more. Don't prematurely optimize ;-)