Skip to content

CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Blog company blog

PostgreSQL Count(*) Performance Improvements

by Laurenz Albe cybertec-postgresql.com published 2019-04-03

count(*) is often quite slow in PostgreSQL. This article explores how to count rows faster using approximations and other tricks.

Read on cybertec-postgresql.com → Discuss on HN (33) Archived copy

Points: 140
HN comments: 33
Submissions: 1
Cited by: 0 commenters

Databases & Data Software Engineering 2019

On Hacker News

Submitted	Title on HN	Points	Comments
Apr 10, 2019	PostgreSQL Count(*) Performance Improvements by turrini	140	33

More from CYBERTEC PostgreSQL Blog

All 14 posts →

Postgres scaling advice

2021392 points200 comments Databases & Data details

Discovering less-known Postgres v12 features

2019243 points30 comments Databases & Data details

Unexpected downsides of UUID keys in PostgreSQL

2023243 points206 commentscited by 3Databases & Data details

Super fast aggregations in PostgreSQL 19

2025226 points30 comments Databases & Data details

PostgreSQL EXPLAIN Output Explained

2021222 points28 comments Databases & Data details

Column order in PostgreSQL does matter

2022209 points90 comments Databases & Data details

Related posts from the same era

Apple open-sources FoundationDB

FoundationDB Blog20182,136 points441 comments details

Personal and social information of 1.2B people discovered in data leak

Data Viper Blog20191,439 points419 comments details

CRDTs are the future

Joseph Gentle20201,181 points357 commentscited by 12 details

Congress votes to make open government data the default in the United States

E Pluribus Unum20181,130 points154 comments details

Things I wished more developers knew about databases

Jaana Dogan20201,011 points445 comments details

JupyterLab is ready for users

Jupyter Blog2018958 points248 comments details