SQL has some human friendly features which should not be used in application coding. Ever. SELECT * does not guarantee any specific order or even the names of columns in the result set, which in the case of a JOIN may not even be unique, and can change between releases. Likewise, INSERT without a column list assumes that the table definition is exactly the same as when the statement was designed. Any change in the ordinal position of any of the columns will silently insert values into "wrong" columns. Any change in the total number of columns will fail if the number of values no longer matches the number of columns.