Best way to test if a row exists in a MySQL table

Question

I\'m trying to find out if a row exists in a table. Using MySQL, is it better to do a query like this:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS total FROM table1 WHERE ...
         


        

Answer 1

For non-InnoDB tables you could also use the information schema tables:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/tables-table.html