People have asked us on several occasions if there is such a construct
SELECT * EXCEPT(...list) FROM sometable. Sadly we do not think such a
thing exists in the ANSI SQL Specs nor in PostgreSQL.
The above feature would come in handy when you have certain fields in your tables that are common
across tables, but you need to leave them out in your query. A common case of this is when you have PostGIS tables loaded using shp2pgsql
with a fields called gid and the_geom which are not terribly useful for simple data queries.
There are 2 common ways we use to achieve this result.
- Using PgAdmin's CREATE SELECT script feature. This exists in other GUI tools as well.
- Using an Information Schema script hack to construct the SELECT statement
