I've been hanging on to this snippet of code (from Brett J.) for quite a while now, mostly because I didn't think it was real. I mean, really, no professional programmer would ever retrieve an entire table and loop through each row, just to get a row count ... right? A few weeks later, I got a similar submission from Sanket. It feel to the bottom of the stack and I never got around to posting it. But just recently, Enigma sent in yet another example of this technique. It had to be posted.

So, here it is: Three different developers. Three different languages. One combined example.

static int GetTableRowCount(string tableName)
{
    int count = 0;
    SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand();
    cmd.Connection = getConn();
    cmd.CommandText = "SELECT * FROM [" + tableName + "]";
    SqlDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
    while (dr.Read()) { count += 1; }
    return count;
}

Oh, and sorry for the terribly bad pun of a title. Hopefully the content makes up for it :-D.

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