Is there any reason to worry about the column order in a table?

Question

I know you can ALTER the column order in MySQL with FIRST and AFTER, but why would you want to bother? Since good queries explicitly name columns when inserting data, is the

Answer 1

The only time you'll need to worry about column order is if your software specifically relies on that order. Typically this is due to the fact that the developer got lazy and did a select * and then referred to the columns by index rather than by name in their result.

Answer 2

In general what happens in SQL Server when you change column order through Management Studio, is that it creates a temp table with the new structure, moves the data to that structure from the old table, drops the old table and renames the new one. As you might imagine, this is a very poor choice for performance if you have a large table. I don't know if My SQL does the same, but it is one reason why many of us avoid reordering columns. Since select * should never be used in a production system, adding columns at the end is not aproblem for a well-designed system. Order of columns inthe table should in genral not be messed with.