This isn't literature per se but I worked on a machine-learning database system (MLDB) which supported tables with millions of columns... We extended SQL's SELECT statement with some functionality to deal with querying by pattern or by exclusion: https://docs.mldb.ai/doc/#builtin/sql/SelectExpression.md.ht... and https://docs.mldb.ai/doc/#builtin/datasets/Datasets.md.html for some references