Everyone busts on SELECT * as if it eats babies for breakfast and feasts on the blood of virgins in the afternoon. Come on! It might be a bit lazy, but if used carefully, it's not always that evil.

In this specific example, the most data you're going to get is a single row, so SELECT * isn't quite as unruly as you'd expect. It's probably not going to return ten thousand columns. Granted, one should only request what they're looking for, but when you're not sure, you might as well just snatch it all than be caught short later. Memory today is measured in megabytes, not kilobytes, so you can be a little more laisez-faire about these things.

Additionally, this is all put into a HASH, so, even if the columns are re-ordered, there's no real risk of damage to the program, provided all the requisite columns are still there. This, of course, is not guaranteed, so one must be careful about column changes, and test code thoroughly.

I agree an unconditional SELECT * where you do combine that with a bind_param_array is playing with fire, but this code isn't quite that risky.

In reply to Re: Code factory by tadman
in thread Code factory by Notromda

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