How do you find the row count for all your tables in Postgres

Question

I\'m looking for a way to find the row count for all my tables in Postgres. I know I can do this one table at a time with:

SELECT count(*) FROM table_name;
         


        

Answer 1

Here is a solution that does not require functions to get an accurate count for each table:

select table_schema, 
       table_name, 
       (xpath('/row/cnt/text()', xml_count))[1]::text::int as row_count
from (
  select table_name, table_schema, 
         query_to_xml(format('select count(*) as cnt from %I.%I', table_schema, table_name), false, true, '') as xml_count
  from information_schema.tables
  where table_schema = 'public' --<< change here for the schema you want
) t

query_to_xml will run the passed SQL query and return an XML with the result (the row count for that table). The outer xpath() will then extract the count information from that xml and convert it to a number

The derived table is not really necessary, but makes the xpath() a bit easier to understand - otherwise the whole query_to_xml() would need to be passed to the xpath() function.