Good article. Has a lot of valuable information about the in's and out's of COUNT.

I've always used code similar to this for finding the row count, provided there is a clustered index.

SELECT ROWS FROM SYSINDEXES WHERE OBJECT_ID('ORDERS') = ID AND INDID < 2

This command only does "2" logical reads, so I'm guessing it performs, slightly better then

select count(*) from orders.

Gregory Larsen, DBA

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