Question

I’m playing around with t-sql and would like to be able to select into some variable.

Currently I just want to get a count(*) for every table in the database and print this.

When I try the following:

EXEC(‘SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ‘+ @table_name)

This gives the counts for all rows, now, I’d like to store the COUNT(*) into a variable. To achieve this i’ve declared. I’ve tried a few different approaches, amongst others this one:

EXEC(‘SELECT ‘ + @row_count +’ = COUNT(*) FROM ‘+ @table_name)

Which yields an error (Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Line 1
Incorrect syntax near ‘=’.).

Any idea how to correctly express this?

Answer 1

There is a more efficient way to get the number of rows in a table, by looking at the database metadata. Here is an alternative solution:

declare @NumRows int;
select @NumRows = sum(rows)
from <database>.sys.partitions P join
     <database>.sys.tables T
      on T.[object_id] = P.[object_id]
where index_id IN (0,1) AND T.[type] = 'U' and t.name = '<table>'