Article on why not to use * in SQL Queries

Today I got to read a very good article on SqlCentral.com. This about a simple example(one of many scenarios ) why developers should not use ‘*’ when writing SQL queries. I felt all developers should read this article as the issue addressed is something that may occur frequently in daily development.

Interesting things that you will learn about this article are:

1. One main difference between User defined functions and SPs(how table structure is stored in system tables in case of UDF and this is updated only when Create function is called which is not the case in Stored procedures)

2. How to easily get a list of columns in a table as comma separated values which will be helpful while writing column names of tables having lots of columns(Especially for people like me who are Excel illiterates J )

Link to the article: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/UDF/62730/