I've worked at a company who produced a large banking application
(about 700 binaries and 200 dynamic libraries). We didn't have
much coding standards, but among the few we had was "you shall
never use 'select *'". Beside the problem mentioned that out
of order applying of patches can produce different order of
columns on tables, the other disadvantage of using 'select *'
is that it's a performance hit. It means that for each time the
query is compiled, the database has to do lookups and figure out
what the columns will be.
'select *' is just there for interactive usuage - applications
should never use them.
Abigail