table-statistics

I have a table in DB and it is approx 90 GB in space. I tried to count no of rows in the table select count(idNewsNotification) from notification and it resulted 4982397 1 row in set (59 min 48.35 sec) But when I queried using show table status like <table_name> it is showing that Engine: InnoDB Version: 10 Row_format: Compact Rows: 8631267 Avg_row_length: 11237 Data_length: 96996425728 Max_data_length: 0 Index_length: 175374336 Data_free: 0 Auto_increment: NULL ..... What is the perfect procedure for knowing the no of records in the table ? The fact that your count took an hour implies that