I feel like this is a weird title. An equivalently bad title would be "SELECTing fewer columns than you need is bad for correctness."
"SELECT *" should be just as performant as "SELECT A, B, C" when your object only has A, B and C as columns.
"SELECT *" should be just as performant as "SELECT A, B, C" when your object only has A, B and C as columns.
The arguments presented in the article may or may not be applicable to your particular application, but I think it's a solid principle that you shouldn't assume your database will retain its schema indefinitely. If you're relying on "SELECT *" to mean "SELECT A, B, C", you're in for a bad time.
this is not a hard thing to anticipate and yet my coworkers thought otherwise...
However, it still stands true in a test of time when you will end up with a lot more columns.
But I didn’t say it’s a good idea to do SELECT * (I never use it outside manual queries), just that it has no performance implication just by virtue of using it.