coding practice

[ramtops]

this is now part of our in-house coding standards:

SELECT count(*) as dracula FROM image

Comments

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite anal enough to benchmark it properly (though a few quick checks on a 2167462 row table showed no significant difference), but I'd have said that in theory "count(*)" gives the DBMS a pretty strong hint that the client isn't interested in table content, so if anything it should be optimised better.

[spride.livejournal.com]

that reminds me of the Oracle developer I once met that used the ROWID column as a metric of table size...ie SELECT MAX (ROWID) FROM foo = number of rows in foo.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

well, I suppose it establishes an upper bound... :)