I heard a rumour that in MySQL, it's faster to select *,... just checking if there's any truth to the rumour.
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Question
SQL Performance question * vs field names
What returns a quicker result set:
A) SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE COLUMN='STRING';
B) SELECT FIELD.TABLE, FIELD2.TABLE, FIELD3.TABLE WHERE COLUMN='STRING';
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Answers
I'm not aware of that. Since your question is MySQL-specific, it would be better if it was asked in the MySQL Topic Area.
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In general specifying the actual column names you require will be faster as that allows an optimum
access path to be chosen by the database manager...
in the case where a whole row is being returned anyway then * is possibly faster as less parsing time may be
required...
however how often will the application require access to all columns on the row... (very infrequently in my
experience)
so specifying column names will NORMALLY be the best option...
The selection of specific columns is faster than selecting all columns by using SELECT *. I agree with "MohanKNair" when he says that the performance hit is particularly felt when you have large text fields stored in different blocks.
Also, using SELECT * is a bad programming practice - even if you want to select all columns, use SELECT a, b, ... - that not only executes your queries faster, but prevents you from unwanted effects of addition of a new column which you might not want in your result-set.
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by: jimhornPosted on 2006-06-22 at 12:11:39ID: 16963022
The * returns all columns, and your other query returns three, so assuming you are going up against the same table in both queries, the one with the fewer number of columns would be faster.