SQL query decoding a table with a second look-up table - mysql

Question

I have two tables - Table 1 of ints and Table 2 of strings.
Table 1:
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| | col A | col B | col C | col D |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
| row 1 | 1 | | | |
| row 2 | | 2 | | |
| row 3 | 8 | 3 | | |
| row 4 | 9 | | 4 | |
+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
Table 2:
+-------+-------+--------------+
| | col A | col B |
+-------+-------+--------------+
| row 1 | 1 | dog |
| row 2 | 2 | cat |
| row 3 | 3 | zebra |
| row 4 | 4 | donkey |
| row 5 | 8 | horse |
| row 6 | 9 | honey badger |
+-------+-------+--------------+
Is there a SQL query that will return the following?
+-------+--------------+-------+--------+-------+
| | col A | col B | col C | col D |
+-------+--------------+-------+--------+-------+
| row 1 | dog | | | |
| row 2 | | cat | | |
| row 3 | horse | zebra | | |
| row 4 | honey badger | | donkey | horse |
+-------+--------------+-------+--------+-------+
At the moment I am SELECT * IN Table_1.
Then querying Table_2 six times to get the result. Is there a more elegent way?
I do want to use SELECT * -- I do not want to specify the table headings in the query (because there are 50+ table headings).

Answer 1

The only way to do lookups for all columns is by mentioning all the columns in the SQL query.
This could be done with one left join for each column, or with correlated subqueries:
SELECT (SELECT colB FROM Table2 WHERE colA = Table1.colA) AS colA,
(SELECT colB FROM Table2 WHERE colA = Table1.colB) AS colB,
(SELECT colB FROM Table2 WHERE colA = Table1.colC) AS colC,
...
FROM Table1
You cannot use SELECT *. If you do not know the columns of Table1, you can read them from the database, and construct the query dynamically.