MySQL get the number of rows in an innodb table

Question

I have a table using innodb. I know the table has roughly 89 million rows. Using

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table;

takes about five minutes to run. I

Answer 1

If you are OK with the estimated number and just don't want to mess with running SHOW TABLE STATUS from PHP, you can use the information_schema DB:

SELECT TABLE_ROWS FROM information_schema.tables
WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'my_db_name' 
AND TABLE_NAME = 'my_table_name';