Performance question

[The14thGOD]

Recently I did a project where I didn't actually need to return anything, was just counting.

 

At the time I was just doing it fast cause of time so I did:

 

SELECT browser FROM the_stats WHERE browser='Firefox' (just as an example)

 

Whats the performance on that vs:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM the_stats WHERE browser='Firefox'

(my first impression would be the above is bad due to the * like SELECT *)

or

SELECT COUNT(browser) FROM the_stats WHERE browser='Firefox'

 

Thanks for any help on clearing this up.

 

Justin

[fenway]

* counts records; specifying an expression counts non-NULLs.