Should I COUNT(*) or not?

Question

I know it\'s generally a bad idea to do queries like this:

SELECT * FROM `group_relations`

But when I just want the count, should I go for this

Answer 1

if you try SELECT COUNT(1) FROM group_relations it will be a bit faster because it will not try to retrieve information from your columns.

COUNT(1) used to be faster than COUNT(*), but that's not true anymore, since modern DBMS are smart enough to know that you don't wanna know about columns