Timothy

>>
>>> I believe many applications can be made to work without reading the row
>>> count in advance...
>
> Ok, ok.
> I do not really have this problem, I was just saying what my expectations
> would be.
>
> But does the engine not need this information internally during all sort of
> queries ?
>

Yes it does, and it uses approximately the heuristic I described -
gets an estimate of the number of data pages in use and multiplies
by the number of rows that fit on a page. Because it can read the
pointer pages and see how many slots are in use, its estimate is
better than you can get, but it's still a rough guess.

Regards,

Ann