Compact?

[Deane Venske]

I have to agree with Ruslan and well the majority of the DB programmers 
out there (At least the ones doing things properly). You should never use 
*, it just opens you up for trouble. Personally I've never found a need 
for a table with 30 fields. You'll probably find with a little work you 
could make your DB alot more relational and it would probably make things 
faster, more stable and alot easier to update in the future. I'm to the 
point where if I need to I'll make 5 tables instead of one because it 
saves so much time in the long run and makes the database design so much 
more logical.

Of course your situation could be unique, but go back to your design, draw 
out some alternatives on paper do some more data definition tables and see 
where you can make things more efficient. And if you wait for a solution 
to * then you'll be waiting a long time in my opinion, you should do 
things properly from the beginning. After all you might only write a query 
that long 50 times in development. If it takes you an extra 2minutes (And 
I don't know many queries that take that long to write) then all it's 
going to take is an extra 2 hours work.