Count table rows

Question

What is the MySQL command to retrieve the count of records in a table?

Answer 1

We have another way to find out the number of rows in a table without running a select query on that table.

Every MySQL instance has information_schema database. If you run the following query, it will give complete details about the table including the approximate number of rows in that table.

select * from information_schema.TABLES where table_name = 'table_name'\G

Answer 2

Just do a

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table;

You can specify conditions with a Where after that

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table WHERE eye_color='brown';

Answer 3

If you have several fields in your table and your table is huge, it's better DO NOT USE * because of it load all fields to memory and using the following will have better performance

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM fooTable;

Answer 4

As mentioned by Santosh, I think this query is suitably fast, while not querying all the table.

To return integer result of number of data records, for a specific tablename in a particular database:

select TABLE_ROWS from information_schema.TABLES where TABLE_SCHEMA = 'database' 
AND table_name='tablename';

Answer 5

You have to use count() returns the number of rows that matches a specified criteria

select count(*) from table_name;