Re: is it possible in pl/sql?

Looney, Jason wrote:

> My understanding was in the past count(*) returned a count of all non-null
> rows, where count(1) (or any constant) returned a count of all rows. I just
> verified this with 10g and this is not the case. The performance difference
> was to perform a full table scan, instead of counting leaf blocks in a
> primary key index or something like that. So maybe this was true in 6 or 7?
>
>

[...]

For what it's worth, my recollection is the same, except I think it was the other way around -- count('x') (based on unique index) would return only non-nulls, because of the way regular indexes handle nulls, while count(*) (full table scan) would return all rows.

I couldn't quickly reproduce the behavior in 10g either, and didn't bother with an older version.

-- 
Mark Bole
http://www.bincomputing.com



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