coding practice

[ramtops]

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

SELECT count(*) as dracula FROM image

Comments

[thunderbox]

I'm sure with a bit of effort you could come up with a working syntax using SET ESCAPE with count and Monte_Cristo…

[spride]

Isn't it less expensive to count a single column?

[budleysalterton]

only if the column is called vlad

[perlmonger]

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]

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.