Stupid question:
Is this just a display thing? Or does this have impact for things such
as COUNT(*) vs COUNT(1)?
Is it "like a view, but on the fly"?
I'm found myself in the *occasional* (certainly not daily!) situation
where such a feature might be useful, but each time I wonder about if
there should be a better way, I realize that if I ever saw such a thing
in production code it would be the first code I shot down. 1) Not
standards compliant, 2) Not deterministic (i.e. a database change might
cause my code to break), 3) Working around a problem that maybe
shouldn't exist in the first place? It's a like buying a rug, so that
nobody sees the scratches on the floor.
I can see the contention. :-)
If it existed, I would occasionally use it from the command line. I'm
thinking three times a year. Certainly not daily. Heck, if it's more
characters to type (than "select * ...") the number of times I would
bother typing it are quite short. :-)
Cheers,
--
Mark Mielke<mark@mielke.cc>