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 approximate number of records, you can use output of "explain".

Simplified verion of the code is

$result = mysql_query('explain SELECT count(*) from TABLE_NAME');
$row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
echo $row['rows'];