Need a Fast Row Count

Is there any other way than "select count(*) from <table>" to return the number of rows in an Oracle table? This takes forever to run (>3 minutes) on a table that has over 3 million rows. I guess it has to do a full table scan to determine the correct number of rows and in a read consistent manner. It would be OK even if we got a count that was fairly close.

Any Ideas or Insight? Received on Thu Mar 23 2000 - 00:00:00 CET