A quick GOogle reveals nothing so maybe I am thinking of something else, but I believe the technique returned the tables cached counter instead of executing the SELECT??? ANy ideas?
I thought I could remember something like this using DESCRIBE, but I guess I was wrong.
Though you could query the information_schema
[text]SELECT `TABLE_ROWS` FROM `information_schema`.`TABLES` WHERE `TABLE_SCHEMA` = 'yourdbname' AND `TABLE_NAME` = 'yourtablename'[/text]
Set Search Time - A google chrome extension. When you search only results from the past year (or set time period) are displayed. Helps tremendously when using new technologies to avoid outdated results.
If you're worried about speed, just count the primary key. I believe I read somewhere that COUNT(*) is slower because it needs to count the rows. COUNT(`whatever your primary key`) may be faster because it can just access the index for that column
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.