Re: Yet Another COUNT(*)...WHERE...question

On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 12:12:03PM +0200, Rainer Bauer wrote:
> "Scott Marlowe" wrote:
>
> >When I go to amazon.com I only ever get three pages of results.  ever.
> > Because they know that returning 190 pages is not that useful, as
> >hardly anyone is going to wander through that many pages.
> >
> >Google, you'll notice says "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,610,000 for
> >blacksmith"  i.e. it's guesstimating as well.  no reason for google to
> >look at every single row for blacksmith to know that there's about 5.6
> >million.
>
> But if you go to eBay, they always give you an accurate count. Even if the no.
> of items found is pretty large (example: <http://search.ebay.com/new>).

And I'd bet money that they're using a full text search of some kind to
get those results, which isn't remotely close to the same thing as a
generic SELECT count(*).
--
Decibel!, aka Jim Nasby                        decibel@decibel.org
EnterpriseDB      http://enterprisedb.com      512.569.9461 (cell)