What if you want to know the exact number of observations in your database? Counting manually sounds like a very very bad idea.

Fortunately, SQL has the built-in functionality of counting rows. To count the number of rows in the whole dataset use COUNT *. For example, we can count the total number of our website being visited by using the following query:

Please note, that for counting the total number of rows you must place * within parenthesis, like COUNT(*).