Question

I Know how to get Number Of Rows in a table in MySQL 5 version and later.

MySQL 5

select table_rows from tables where table_name = 'tableName';

I want to know how to get this in MySQL 4 because count(*) query takes to 4 to 5 minutes in large tables.

Answer 1

SELECT COUNT(*) tells the database engine to still iterate over the individual fields or each record. Since you only care about the raw number of rows, you can try @dj2’s suggestion and do

SELECT COUNT(1) FROM <TableName>

But I wonder if you get any better performance by counting on the primary key by querying over your clustered index.

SELECT COUNT(<PrimaryKey>) FROM <TableName>