MySQL gives fluctuating row count when I query schema?

Question

Here I am pressing up and running the same command on my dev DB on my laptop, over and over;

mysql> select count(*) from tblTraceOutput;
+----------+
| co         


        

Answer 1

Assuming you are using InnoDB, as that is the default in 5.5.x according to the MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA TABLES documentation.

And this note:

The TABLE_ROWS column is NULL if the table is in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database.

For InnoDB tables, the row count is only a rough estimate used in SQL optimization. (This is also true if the InnoDB table is partitioned.)