How to do a count on a union query

Question

I have the following query:

select distinct profile_id from userprofile_...

union

select distinct profile_id from productions_...

How wou

Answer 1

This will perform pretty well:

select count(*) from (
    select profile_id
    from userprofile_...
    union
    select profile_id
    from productions_...
) x

The use of union guarantees distinct values - union removes duplicates, union all preserves them. This means you don't need the distinct keyword (the other answers don't exploit this fact and end up doing more work).

Edited:

If you want to total number of different profile_id in each, where given values that appear in both table are considered different values, use this:

select sum(count) from (
    select count(distinct profile_id) as count
    from userprofile_...
    union all
    select count(distinct profile_id)
    from productions_...
) x

This query will out-perform all other answers, because the database can efficiently count distinct values within a table much faster than from the unioned list. The sum() simply adds the two counts together.