Hi Adam,

I'm sorry I have wasted your time (it is kind of you to explain
something like how count(*) works in FB - I would have just told
someone to search the archives!)

I must have characterized my enquiry badly. It is not the count(*)
that I am interested in. It is to do with the other statistics. I
think that the aggregations I'm doing selecting from over 31 million
records were quite speedy - the company I used to work for paid lots
of money for Oracle, and their data sets were smaller than the test
data with which I have filled my db. I just wondered if my
expectations about what is acceptable speed conformed to other
people's expectations. In my last job I was not so closely involved
with the Oracle team to know what kind of results were within their
acceptable range.

Also, am I right in thinking that the stats shown (lots of fetchs, no
reads and writes) indicate that the rows are coming from the cache?

I think your suggestions for dealing with the way that MVCC DBs handle
counting whole tables are very good though.

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "Adam" <s3057043@y...> wrote:
> Hello Bernard,
>
> This sort of comment appears about twice a week, so I am sure by now
> it is on a FAQ somewhere, but please take a moment to look at what a
> select count(*) has to do.