UMG Developer (10/19/2010)
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.)
Fortunately for me, I don't know anything about Oracle past version 8i and 9. Perhaps they figured out how to speed up their count(*) by now (it is 21st century after all). The bottom line is that the execution time of Oracle's count(*) is still inferior when compared with SQL Server 2000 or better.
Oleg