Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col) it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just using what they happen to like, while there is substantial difference in performance and even query result. Lets look at the following series of examples:
Wrong GROUP BY makes your queries fragile
September 6, 2006 By 7 Comments
This is probably well known issue for everyone having some MySQL experience or experience with any other SQL database. Still I see this problem in many production applications so it is worth to mention it, especially as it is connected to MySQL Performance. No it might not affect MySQL Performance per say but it limits [...]
