Your method will work, but not the way you say.

In MySQL, COUNT(*) (without a WHERE clause) is optimized so that it will get the result from the description table, without physically counting the records.

Thus, your query will be slower than using COUNT. ;)

jeffa's method is the fastest you can get in this case.

In reply to Re: Re: DBI: Better way to find number of rows in a table? by rnahi
in thread DBI: Better way to find number of rows in a table? by anjiro

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