Question

I would think this would be easy for an SQL-alike! What I want is the GQL equivalent of:

select count(*) from foo;

and to get back an answer something similar to:

1972 records.

And I want to do this in GQL from the “command line” in the web-based DataStore viewer. (You know, the one that shows 20 at a time and lets me see “next 20”)

Anyway — I’m sure it’s brain-dead easy, I just can’t seem to find the correct syntax. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

As it’s stated in other questions, it looks like there is no count aggregate function in GQL. The GQL Reference also doesn’t say there is the ability to do this, though it doesn’t explicitly say that it’s not possible.

In the development console (running your application locally) it looks like just clicking the “List Entities” button will show you a list of all entities of a certain type, and you can see “Results 1-10 of (some number)” to get a total count in your development environment.

In production you can use the “Datastore Statistics” tab (the link right underneath the Datastore Viewer), choose “Display Statistics for: (your entity type)” and it will show you the total number of entities, however this is not the freshest view of the data (updated “at least once per day”).

Since you can’t run arbitrary code in production via the browser, I don’t think saying “use .count() on a query” would help, but if you’re using the Remote API, the .count() method is no longer capped at 1000 entries as of August, 2010, so you should be able to run print MyEntity.all().count() and get the result you want.