Posted by Marek Kilimajer on 07/06/05 17:15

Richard Davey wrote:
> Hello André,
>
> Wednesday, July 6, 2005, 3:25:37 PM, you wrote:
>
> AM> Depending on the sittuation, IMHO, COUNT(*) wouldn't be the way to
> AM> go. If you need the user's id or somesuch, you have to run an
> AM> additional query to get the info.
>
> But they're returning absolutely nothing in this case - which
> (providing username was indexed) would make count() a far quicker and
> less expensive query than selecting and bring back data and then doing
> absolutely nothing with it (somewhat pointless imho)

You can select just the id, and provided that the query returns just
zero or one row, you can spare one function call.

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