[Q]HowTo get the count of selected rows

Hello,

Is it possible to construct a new SQL statement from an arbitrary SELECT statement which will always simply return the number of rows which would be selected by the original query?

For example, suppose I had the following:

        SELECT DISTINCT fld1,fld2 FROM table1;

How can one quickly determine the number of rows that this statement will match without actually returning the data. I could simply issue the query twice, and count the rows the first time, but I need better performance. If DISTINCT was not present in the query above, one could simply say

        SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table1;

Using stored procedures is not an option for us at this point because our CORBA RDBMS server won't properly invoke stored procedures in Oracle. We are using Oracle 7.3.2.

Thanks

Randall Smith Received on Fri Mar 14 1997 - 00:00:00 CST