There are a lot of reasons NOT to use SELECT * but sending extra data over the wire is not one of them. This is just optimizing for a 2nd (or 3rd or lower) prob

There are a lot of reasons NOT to use SELECT * but sending extra data over the wire is not one of them. This is just optimizing for a 2nd (or 3rd or lower) problem when there are much bigger and easier gains to be captured. If wire-level payload size IS your big concern you should probably be looking at an entire myriad of things beyond your projection, like the actual query, or your protocol or caching or if you should even be using a RDBMS. Yes, you should be more explicit in your queries, in which case SELECT A,B,C FROM TBL; should likely become SELECT t.[A] ,t.[B] ,t.[C] FROM TBL t; YMMV