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I recently answered this question based on my experience:

Counting rows before proceeding to actual searching

but I'm not 100% satisfied with the answer I gave.

The question is basically this: Can I get a performance improvement by running a COUNT over a particular query before deciding to run the query that brings back the actual rows?

My intuition is this: you will only save the I/O and wire time associated with retrieving the data instead of the count because to count the data, you need to actually find the rows. The possible exception to this is when the query is a simple function of the indexes.

My question then is this: Is this always true? What other exception cases are there? From a pure performance perspective, in what cases would one want to do a COUNT before running the full query?

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1 Answers1

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First, the answer to your question is highly dependent on the database.

I cannot think of a situation when doing a COUNT() before a query will shorten the overall time for both the query and the count().

In general, doing a count will pre-load tables and indexes into the page cache. Assuming the data fits in memory, this will make the subsequent query run faster (although not much faster if you have fast I/O and the database does read-ahead page reading). However, you have just shifted the time frame to the COUNT(), rather than reducing overall time.

To shorten the overall time (including the run time of the COUNT()) would require changing the execution plan. Here are two ways this could theoretically happen:

  1. A database could update statistics as a table is read in, and these statistics, in turn, change the query plan for the main query.
  2. A database could change the execution plan based on whether tables/indexes are already in the page cache.

Although theoretically possible, I am not aware of any database that does either of these.

You could imagine that intermediate results could be stored, but this would violate the dynamic nature of SQL databases. That is, updates/inserts could occur on the tables between the COUNT() and the query. A database engine could not maintain integrity and maintain such intermediate results.

Doing a COUNT() has disadvantages, relative to speeding up the subsequent query. The query plan for the COUNT() might be quite different from the query plan for the main query. Your example with indexes is one case. Another case would be in a columnar database, where different vertical partitions of the data do not need to be read.

Yet another case would be a query such as:

select t.*, r.val
from table t left outer join
     ref r
     on t.refID = r.refID

and refID is a unique index on the ref table. This join can be eliminated for a count, since there are not duplicates and all records in t are used. However, the join is clearly needed for this query. Once again, whether a SQL optimizer recognizes and acts on this situation is entirely the decision of the writers of the database. However, the join could theoretically be optimized away for the COUNT().

Gordon Linoff
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