• Thanks for the replys. I agree that checking it out myself is always the best route, and I generally don't take someones word (especially on the internet) at face value without verifying it myself.

    That being said, I had no idea how to verify this statement from the link above: "However, from an 'internal' standpoint, SELECT * causes the SQL engine to check the data dictionary unnecessarily" and for this reason it seems the author was advocating the use of a constant instead of SELECT *.

    How would you test this? Would something like this show in an execution plan?