coding practice

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

SELECT count(*) as dracula FROM image

6 thoughts on “coding practice”

thunderbox says:

January 18, 2006 at 12:33 pm

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 says:

January 18, 2006 at 1:18 pm

Isn’t it less expensive to count a single column?
1. budleysalterton says:
  
  January 19, 2006 at 9:10 am
  
  only if the column is called vlad
2. perlmonger says:
  
  January 19, 2006 at 12:14 pm
  
  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.
  1. spride says:
    
    January 19, 2006 at 12:29 pm
    
    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.
    1. perlmonger says:
      
      January 19, 2006 at 12:31 pm
      
      well, I suppose it establishes an upper bound… 🙂

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