Ambiguous Columns in Queries when Using One Table

Dave Bland shows how easy it is to get the “Ambiguous column name” error message when querying from a single table:

When I added the “*”, this is where I received unexpected results.  All I did was add the “*”.  Looking at the code below, you can see SQL Server is having issues with the Name column in the ORDER BY.

I do wish SQL had a symbol representing “everything else,” where the engine of choice would include all columns except those explicitly named. I know there’d be trickiness around things like “LTRIM(ColumnA) AS TrimmedColumnA” but that’d be for the language designers to figure out…