• Oleg Netchaev (10/19/2010)


    Very true indeed. I did have quite few unfortunate years in my career when I had to work with Oracle databases. I remember it used to really frustrate me that the select count(*) from the_table; in Oracle takes forever longer than the similar query against similar table in SQL Server. Of course there was a decent workaround to NEVER use count(*), but opt for a much better performing count('X') instead, but still it was frustrating.

    I don't know that that is true anymore, at least with Oracle 10g. Count(*) is still slow compared to SQL Server, but I find that Count('X') is even slower. (36 secs vs. 80 secs in my test.)