How can I “select *” from a table in MySQL but omit certain columns?

Question

I have a table with the following columns:

id,name,age,surname,lastname,catgory,active

Instead of: SELECT name,age,surname,lastname,c

Answer 1

I'm fairly certain you can't. Probably the best way I can think of is to create SELECT name, age, surname, lastname, category FROM table as a view, then just SELECT * FROM view. I prefer to always select from a view anyway.

However, as others have pointed out, if another column gets added to the view your application could fail. On some systems as well (PostgreSQL is a candidate) you cannot alter the table without first dropping the view so it becomes a bit cumbersome.