We've had terrible problems with bugs caused by developers using select * with bind_cols. Frequently the problem can not be reproduced on our development system. Table changes affect the order and/or number of columns, so the hard-coded variable list in bind_cols is a bug waiting to happen.

Selecting explicit columns fixes the problem, but then the column list is redundant with the bound variable list -- bad (short, weird abbreviations, etc.) variable names can be used because it's "obvious" what the variable holds.

I like fetchrow_hashref because it's safe to use with select *, self-documents use of database columns in the code, and does not have annoying redundancy between variable names and column names. Hakkr was probably thinking of these advantages.

In reply to select * and bind_cols considered harmful by blssu
in thread Perl Programming guidelines/rules by hakkr

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