What is faster SELECT * or SELECT `field` when only requiring `field`

Question

I don't want to assume here, I've been bitten/proven wrong before.

Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

SELECT field is faster than select *.

Because if you have more than 1 field/column in your table then select * will return all of those, and that requires network bandwidth and more work for the database to fetch all the other fields. But if you only require one field/column, the database load is less and it doesnt need to transmit unneeded information and thus take bandwidth resources uncesseraly.