What are the potential consequences of not specifying individual column names in a SELECT query in PHP when interacting with a database?

Not specifying individual column names in a SELECT query can lead to potential issues such as retrieving unnecessary data, decreased performance due to fetching more data than needed, and potential security risks if sensitive information is inadvertently exposed. To solve this issue, always explicitly specify the column names you want to retrieve in your SELECT query to ensure you only fetch the necessary data.

// Specify individual column names in the SELECT query
$query = "SELECT column1, column2, column3 FROM table_name";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);

// Fetch and process the results
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    // Process the data here
}