Any benefit to listing unused columns in SELECT statement?

I've inherited a large body of SQL statements, and many of them use this kind of idiom:

select name, state, zip
from customers
where state = 'NY'
and zip = '11011';

The interesting part is that (this is oo4o, BTW), only the 'name' value is used later on in the (C++) program. So, it looks to me as if (a) the original author thought that if a column appeared in the where clause, it had to also appear in the select clause, or (b) this is some obscure Oracle tuning custom I'm unfamiliar with.

Any ideas? TIA. Received on Thu Jan 02 2003 - 19:15:58 CET