Number of rows in each Table – Various Databases

Posted on October 24, 2022 Updated on October 24, 2022

A possible common task developers perform is to find out how many records exists in every table in a schema. In the examples below I’ll show examples for the current schema of the developer, but these can be expanded easily to include tables in other schemas or for all schemas across a database.

These example include the different ways of determining this information across the main databases including Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server and Snowflake.

A little warning before using these queries. They may or may not give the true accurate number of records in the tables. These examples illustrate extracting the number of records from the data dictionaries of the databases. This is dependent on background processes being run to gather this information. These background processes run from time to time, anything from a few minutes to many tens of minutes. So, these results are good indication of the number of records in each table.

Oracle

SELECT table_name, num_rows
FROM user_tables
ORDER BY num_rows DESC;

or

SELECT table_name,
       to_number(
          extractvalue(xmltype(
             dbms_xmlgen.getxml('select count(*) c from '||table_name))
                ,'/ROWSET/ROW/C')) tab_count
FROM   user_tables
ORDER BY tab_count desc;

Using PL/SQL we can do something like the following.

DECLARE
   val NUMBER;
BEGIN
   FOR i IN (SELECT table_name FROM user_tables ORDER BY table_name desc) LOOP
      EXECUTE IMMEDIATE 'SELECT count(*) FROM '|| i.table_name INTO val;
      DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE(i.table_name||' -> '|| val );
   END LOOP;
END;

MySQL

SELECT table_name, table_rows
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
WHERE table_type = 'BASE TABLE'
AND  TABLE_SCHEMA = current_user();

Using Common Table Expressions (CTE), using WITH clause

WITH table_list AS (
SELECT
    table_name
  FROM information_schema.tables 
  WHERE table_schema = current_user() 
  AND
        table_type = 'BASE TABLE'
) 
SELECT CONCAT(
            GROUP_CONCAT(CONCAT("SELECT '",table_name,"' table_name,COUNT(*) rows FROM ",table_name) SEPARATOR " UNION "),
            ' ORDER BY table_name'
        )
INTO @sql
FROM table_list;

Postgres

select relname as table_name, n_live_tup as num_rows from pg_stat_user_tables;

An alternative is

select n.nspname as table_schema,
       c.relname as table_name,
       c.reltuples as rows
from pg_class c
join pg_namespace n on n.oid = c.relnamespace
where c.relkind = 'r'
      and n.nspname = current_user
order by c.reltuples desc;

SQL Server

SELECT tab.name, 
       sum(par.rows) 
FROM   sys.tables tab INNER JOIN sys.partitions par 
          ON tab.object_id = par.object_id 
WHERE  schema_name(tab.schema_id) = current_user

Snowflake

SELECT t.table_schema, t.table_name, t.row_count 
FROM   information_schema.tables t
WHERE  t.table_type = 'BASE TABLE'
AND    t.table_schema = current_user
order by t.row_count desc;

The examples give above are some of the ways to obtain this information. As with most things, there can be multiple ways of doing it, and most people will have their preferred one which is based on their background and preferences.

As you can see from the code given above they are all very similar, with similar syntax, etc. The only thing different is the name of the data dictionary table/view containing the information needed. Yes, knowing what data dictionary views to query can be a little challenging as you switch between databases.