SELECT is a war crime

Description:
Everyone using SELECT * is wrong — your dashboard needs three columns.

One query, one table, sixty columns, twelve million rows — and your dashboard needs three. The number hides the plan: every junior asks, every senior pretends, and the schema grows to justify the query. This is the Staff Engineer's guide: invent work so hard the metrics need a feature. The damage is not the I/O. The damage is the culture. Rewrites, migrations, new indices, a redis layer for a query that should never have existed. Fake efficiency, fake scale, fake complexity. Verdict: the star is the signature of the architect who stopped caring. Name the columns, or name the cost.

EXPLOIT TIMELINE:
0:00 The star
0:04 Twelve million rows, three needed
0:09 Indices as apology
0:14 The invented work
0:19 The verdict: name or cost

That is the part of A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work that no benchmark screenshot captures. If your own experience matches any of this, drop a comment with the detail that mattered most — I read every reply and answer the sharpest ones.

Do not subscribe - if you want efficient queries written by someone who reads the plan.

---
TACTICAL DEBRIEF: 1) Select what you use 2) Indexes do not fix wrong queries 3) Work invented is work billed 4) The plan is the receipt

!-- c3VkbyAkKGhpc3RvcnkgLXAgISEpICAjIGJlY2F1c2UgeW91IGZvcmdvdCwgYWdhaW4= --

#SQL #Database #StaffEngineer #Performance