I know that in order to reduce network traffic you should always select only
the columns you require but I have a stored procedure which must **always**
return all columns from a specific table.

When returning all columns from a table is there any performance gain (or
any other reason) for using SELECT col1, col2 etc... instead of just SELECT
* ?

I can immediately think of a disadvantage which is that if you include named
columns in your SELECT then you must update the stored procedure each time a
column is added to the table, using SELECT * gets around this so the stored
procedure will never need to be modified.

Would anyone care to share their thoughts on the above?

Thanks,

Clive