Question

would this be the correct way to display the number or records in a particular table, I am just going to put this in an if statement so if there are more than 20 do something ?

 $query = "SELECT COUNT(1) FROM mytable"); 
  $result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error()); 

 $row = mysql_fetch_row($result); 

 echo $row[0];  

Answer 1

use COUNT(*) instead of COUNT(1)

generally both will work, the difference is that COUNT(*) counts number of matched rows and COUNT(something) calculates number of matched rows for which something is not null. To clarify, given a table:

 test
 a     b
 1     2
 NULL  3
 2     4

 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM test; -- 3
 SELECT COUNT(a) FROM test; -- 2
 SELECT COUNT(b) FROM test; -- 3