• I had always heard that you should do a "select count(1) from table".

    http://www.techonthenet.com/sql/count.php

    "TIP: Performance Tuning

    Since the COUNT function will return the same results regardless of what NOT NULL field(s) you include as the COUNT function parameters (ie: within the brackets), you can change the syntax of the COUNT function to COUNT(1) to get better performance as the database engine will not have to fetch back the data fields."