This question was inspired by a previous question posted on SO, "Does the order of the WHERE clause make a differnece?". Would it improve a SELECT statement's performance if the the columns used in the WHERE section are placed at the begining of the SELECT statement?

example:

    SELECT customer.id, 
           transaction.id, 
           transaction.efective_date, 
           transaction.a,
           [...]
      FROM customer, transaction 
     WHERE customer.id = transaction.id;

I do know that limiting the list of columns to only the needed ones in a SELECT statement improves performance as opposed to using SELECT * because the current list is smaller.