I'm seeing a lot of comments on why SELECT * is fine or not, but it seems like the bigger issue is that (in general) SQL has two very limited ways of letting yo

I'm seeing a lot of comments on why SELECT * is fine or not, but it seems like the bigger issue is that (in general) SQL has two very limited ways of letting your select columns: explicitly naming each column, or getting all columns. This means that when you are concise, you sometimes end up getting columns you don't need. For example, R's dbplyr library lets you write queries that select all columns that start_with("something_"). This is revolutionary, because now a person can use the semantics of column names in their selection! Granted, dbplyr ultimately generates a query that explicitly names the columns, so it's not a within-SQL solution, but I've been surprised at how useful the behavior is!