I never worked with Oracle 6, but I would be really surprised if count (*) omitted counting nulls at any point in Oracle's past. Here's what the 7.3 manual has to say: -- ---- ---- ---- ---- -----
Oracle7 Server SQL Reference Manual, Release 7.3 February 1996, Part No. A32538-1 Chapter 3: Operators, Functions, Expressions, Conditions COUNT Syntax COUNT({* | [DISTINCT|ALL] expr}) Purpose Returns the number of rows in the query. If you specify expr, this function returns rows where expr is not null. You can count either all rows, or only distinct values of expr. If you specify the asterisk (*), this function returns all rows, including duplicates and nulls.
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-- --Original Message-- -- Looney, Jason
My understanding was in the past count(*) returned a count of all non-null rows, where count(1) (or any constant) returned a count of all rows.
