Subject Re: [IBO] Fastest Count
Author Svein Erling Tysvær
--- In, "Bill Gage" wrote:
> Well our databases are so huge that we have to split them down into
> separate databases for each month.

Oops, exactly how huge is "huge"? Counting records is generally slow
in client/server databases like Firebird and should be used with care.
Firebird has to look up every record (to see whether it is visible to
the transaction that does the 'select count'). Hence, if you're
talking about counting more than a million records or so (depending on
lots of stuff, e.g. if you're the only user and are patient enough to
wait for a long time, you could do select counts on 100 million
records or more, whereas counting 100000 records could be unacceptable
in a system with lots of concurrent users), you may find that you have
to restrict which counts should be allowed.