david.gugg (7/25/2016)

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I think this kind of makes sense if you come at it from the Oracle perspective. In Oracle, to select values you have to go against the SYS.DUAL table, a table with a single dummy record. For example, the equivalent of SELECT GETDATE(); in Oracle would be SELECT sysdate FROM dual;. So the equivalent of SELECT COUNT(1); in Oracle would be SELECT COUNT(1) FROM dual;, which would return 1.