CF9 Problems with Select * query, resulting in Value can not be converted to requested type.

Question

So, I work on a legacy CF web site and there are numerous SELECT * FROM USERS_TABLE queries all over the site.
Well, we changed the structure of said table in the database on our Testing and Staging sites, with no issues.
When we pushed up to our production environment and changed the structure of the production DB table, the server kept kicking back "Value can not be converted to requested type."
After doing some searching out there, it looks like CF caches the structure of the table, and you either have to restart CF to clear it, or rename and then name-back the DSN to fix the issue.
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/194-ColdFusion-Query-Error-Value-Can-Not-Be-Converted-To-Requ ested-Type.htm
That said, this doesn't happen in our testing and staging environments - so what would be the difference?
Is there some setting I need to change in the CF Admin to keep this from happening again?

Answer 1

Also, if you can use a Stored Procedure to retrieve the data, do so.  Standard queries gets all the information, anyway, chokes bandwidth passing it all to the CF server, and forces the CF server to filter, sort, and format the data.  SPs tell the db server to get ONLY the data requested, and forces the db server to filter and sort the data, leaving only formatting to the CF server.
That's not true. The only time CF messes with data returned from the DB is if there's a maxrows attribute, and the record set returnded from the DB has more than that number of records... which causes CF to truncate the recordset to the correct size before returning it. The DB might or might not stop sending rows down to CF after CF says "yeah, I've got all I want now".
Other than that, for all intents and purposes all CF does with the SQL is pass it to the DB and wait for an answer. The only thing it does to the returned data is to create a CF record set ("query") with it... this does not involve any filtering and sorting.
Adam