Best way to get result count before LIMIT was applied

Question

When paging through data that comes from a DB, you need to know how many pages there will be to render the page jump controls.

Currently I do that by running the que

Answer 1

As I describe on my blog, MySQL has a feature called SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS. This removes the need to do the query twice, but it still needs to do the query in its entireity, even if the limit clause would have allowed it to stop early.

As far as I know, there is no similar feature for PostgreSQL. One thing to watch out for when doing pagination (the most common thing for which LIMIT is used IMHO): doing an "OFFSET 1000 LIMIT 10" means that the DB has to fetch at least 1010 rows, even if it only gives you 10. A more performant way to do is to remember the value of the row you are ordering by for the previous row (the 1000th in this case) and rewrite the query like this: "... WHERE order_row > value_of_1000_th LIMIT 10". The advantage is that "order_row" is most probably indexed (if not, you've go a problem). The disadvantage being that if new elements are added between page views, this can get a little out of synch (but then again, it may not be observable by visitors and can be a big performance gain).