SQLite - getting number of rows in a database

Viewed 158782

I want to get a number of rows in my table using max(id). When it returns NULL - if there are no rows in the table - I want to return 0. And when there are rows I want to return max(id) + 1.

My rows are being numbered from 0 and autoincreased.

Here is my statement:

SELECT CASE WHEN MAX(id) != NULL THEN (MAX(id) + 1) ELSE 0 END FROM words

But it is always returning me 0. What have I done wrong?

6 Answers

If you want to use the MAX(id) instead of the count, after reading the comments from Pax then the following SQL will give you what you want

SELECT COALESCE(MAX(id)+1, 0) FROM words

In SQL, NULL = NULL is false, you usually have to use IS NULL:

SELECT CASE WHEN MAX(id) IS NULL THEN 0 ELSE (MAX(id) + 1) END FROM words

But, if you want the number of rows, you should just use count(id) since your solution will give 10 if your rows are (0,1,3,5,9) where it should give 5.

If you can guarantee you will always ids from 0 to N, max(id)+1 may be faster depending on the index implementation (it may be faster to traverse the right side of a balanced tree rather than traversing the whole tree, counting.

But that's very implementation-specific and I would advise against relying on it, not least because it locks your performance to a specific DBMS.

Extension of VolkerK's answer, to make code a little more readable, you can use AS to reference the count, example below:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS c from profile

This makes for much easier reading in some frameworks, for example, i'm using Exponent's (React Native) Sqlite integration, and without the AS statement, the code is pretty ugly.

Related