Re: Count massively faster than select on same query, why?!?!

[Bob Field]

The SELECT * does make use of indexes when it can. But then it has to retrieve a whole lot more data, including in your case blobs and such. If your table contains blobs, the SELECT * approach is probably never going to be optimal unless you really and truly need all those columns retrieved, and there's a lot of good reasons why you shouldn't use the wildcard but should list all the fields explicitly, from both security and performance standpoints.

I'm not sure of the exact details on MyISAM file opening logic, you'd have to ask someone on the MyISAM forum for a specific answer. I know blob fields are stored differently from other datatypes, but again I am not up on the specifics.