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 much simpler way.

tables="$(echo '\dt' | psql -U "${PGUSER}" | tail -n +4 | head -n-2 | tr -d ' ' | cut -d '|' -f2)"
for table in $tables; do
printf "%s: %s\n" "$table" "$(echo "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $table;" | psql -U "${PGUSER}" | tail -n +3 | head -n-2 | tr -d ' ')"
done

output should look like this

auth_group: 0
auth_group_permissions: 0
auth_permission: 36
auth_user: 2
auth_user_groups: 0
auth_user_user_permissions: 0
authtoken_token: 2
django_admin_log: 0
django_content_type: 9
django_migrations: 22
django_session: 0
mydata_table1: 9011
mydata_table2: 3499

you can update the psql -U "${PGUSER}" portion as needed to access your database

note that the head -n-2 syntax may not work in macOS, you could probably just use a different implementation there

Tested on psql (PostgreSQL) 11.2 under CentOS 7

---

if you want it sorted by table, then just wrap it with sort

for table in $tables; do
printf "%s: %s\n" "$table" "$(echo "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $table;" | psql -U "${PGUSER}" | tail -n +3 | head -n-2 | tr -d ' ')"
done | sort -k 2,2nr

output;

mydata_table1: 9011
mydata_table2: 3499
auth_permission: 36
django_migrations: 22
django_content_type: 9
authtoken_token: 2
auth_user: 2
auth_group: 0
auth_group_permissions: 0
auth_user_groups: 0
auth_user_user_permissions: 0
django_admin_log: 0
django_session: 0