Rick,

R> This has been brought up before. If it were implemented,
R> APPROXIMATE_COUNT would probably always return 42.

I'd try to be a little more pragmatic. Something that returns the
order of magniture of the record count of a huge dataset has its uses.
AFAIK that's what the optimizer does to estimate relation cardinality.

R> There are other solutions to returning an approximate number in a web
R> application.
R> Off the top of my head, the value could be in the response after the
R> results, so that the results are rendered in the browser^H^H^H^H^H^H
R> user-agent, and the total rendered soon after.
R> If it's stateful (due to sessions for example), the value could be
R> updated after the response is sent.

In response? Sure, but who's going to compute it?

Ciao
--
Nando Dessena
http://www.flamerobin.org