Why is selecting specified columns, and all, wrong in Oracle SQL?
ora-00936, oracle, sql, table-alias
Solution
Actually, it's easy to solve the original problem. You just have to qualify the *.
select is_parent, animals.* from animals;
should work just fine. Aliases for the table names also work.
Problem
Say I have a select statement that goes.. ``` select * from animals ``` That gives a a query result of all the columns in the table. Now, if the 42nd column of the table `animals` is `is_parent`, and I want to return that in my results, just after `gender`, so I can see it more easily. But I also want all the other columns. ``` select is_parent, * from animals ``` This returns `ORA-00936: missing expression`. The same statement will work fine in Sybase, and I know that you need to add a table alias to the `animals` table to get it to work ( `select is_parent, a.* from animals ani`), but why must Oracle need a table alias to be able to work out the select?