Re: Performance of count(*)

Steve Atkins wrote:
> As long as you're ordering by some row in the table then you can do that in
> straight SQL.
>
> select a, b, ts from foo where (stuff) and foo > X order by foo limit 10
>
> Then, record the last value of foo you read, and plug it in as X the next
> time around.

We've been over this before in this forum: It doesn't work as advertised. Look for postings by me regarding the fact that there is no way to tell the optimizer the cost of executing a function. There's one, for example, on Oct 18, 2006.

> I think the problem is more that most web developers aren't very good
> at using the database, and tend to fall back on simplistic, wrong,
> approaches
> to displaying the data. There's a lot of monkey-see, monkey-do in web
> UI design too, which doesn't help.

Thanks, I'm sure your thoughtful comments will help me solve my problem. Somehow. ;-)

Craig