A long time ago I came across a quirk with MySQL that would not let you select all columns in a query if you first specify a column name. So executing the following SQL:
select post_title, * from posts;
would throw a syntax error:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '* from posts' at line 1
Specifying the column after the * does work though:
select *, post_title from posts;
For a while this caused a problem especially when testing queries, but then I realised that to get round this quirk you can give the table an alias and then use the alias to select all columns:
select post_title, p.* from posts p;