I just try to avoid select * in any serious 'production' type code that i might churn out. Sure, i have been known to be lazy and use select * (i've also been know to use dot star in my regexes!), but i (hopefully) will turn right around and replace the * with the column names. Now, consider this silly but possible example:

my $sth = $dbh->prepare('
   select * from album,song
   limit 2
');

$sth->execute();
print Dumper $sth->fetchrow_hashref();

print Dumper $sth->fetchrow_arrayref();

__END__
$VAR1 = {
    'album_id' => '1',
    'title' => 'Until the End of the World',
    'artist_id' => '1',
    'year' => '1991',
    'id' => '1'
  };
$VAR1 = [
    '2',
    'War',
    '1983',
    '1',
    '1',
    'Until the End of the World',
    '1'
  ];
[download]

So, how do you select the columns when you don't know ahead of time what they will be. Most likely in a vendor-specific way. Here is one way to do it with MySQL:

my @fields = map {
   $_->[0]
} @{$dbh->selectall_arrayref('desc song')};

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("
   select @{[join(',',@fields)]}
   from song
");
$sth->execute();
[download]

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)