I've always viewed SELECT * as a convinence for schema discovery and a huge bonus for subqueries - our shop excludes its use at the top level in production due to the danger of table definitions changing underneath... but we happily allow subqueries to use SELECT * so long as that column list is clearly defined before we leave the database.

Worst, by far, than a column you didn't expect being added is a column you did expect being removed. Depending on how thorough your integration tests are (and ideally they should be pretty thorough) you could suddenly start getting strange array key access (or object key unfound) errors somewhere on the other side of the codebase.

"A traditional SQL SELECT query requires that requested columns be explicitly specified, with one notable exception: the * wildcard. SELECT * allows SQL to return all relevant columns. This adds tremendous flexibility, especially when building queries on top of one another. However, we are often interested in almost all columns. In DuckDB, simply specify which columns to EXCLUDE:"

It appears how this works is that is selects all columns and then EXCLUDES only the column's specified, the reason this doesn't exist in normal SQL is because it is a terrible idea. This is something that will break at many companies with large technical debt if it is ever used.