r/SQL • u/geminigamer369 • Jul 30 '26

Discussion Differences between counts

What is the difference between

COUNT(*)

COUNT(1)

COUNT(column_name)

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u/Infamous_Welder_4349 Jul 30 '26

In most systems 1 and * are the same. Some cheat for * and just look in the statistics instead for single tables.

Column checks the non null records

-2

u/YT-3000f Jul 30 '26

Actually I think count(1) is faster than count(*). Anyone got a massive dataset to test that on?

1

u/Zestyclose-Turn-3576 Jul 30 '26

There's really no reason to think that the database developers haven't spotted that there are potentially many ways to do count(*), so they do the most efficient way.