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Count

We can use a SELECT statement to get a count of the records within a table. This can be very useful when we need to know how many records there are, but we don't particularly care what's in them.

Here's an example in SQLite:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM employees;

The * in this case refers to a column name. We don't care about the count of a specific column – we want to know the number of total records, so we can use the wildcard (*).

Assignment

Here is the current state of our users table:

id	name	age	country_code	username	password	is_admin
1	David	34	US	DavidDev	insertPractice	0
2	Samantha	29	BR	Sammy93	addingRecords!	0
3	John	39	CA	Jjdev21	welovebootdev	0
4	Ram	42	IN	Ram11c	thisSQLcourserocks	0
5	Hunter	30	US	Hdev92	backendDev	0
6	Allan	27	US	Alires	iLoveB00tdev	1
7	Lance	20	US	LanChr	b00tdevisbest	0
8	Tiffany	28	US	Tifferoon	autoincrement	1

Our business strategy team at CashPal wants to know how many users of the app we have. We can't use the id number to calculate the count because user accounts can be deleted!

Use a COUNT(*) statement to retrieve the number of records in the users table.

In this course, stick to using * with COUNT unless the instructions specifically say to count a particular column.