Fastest way to check total number of rows from View ?

Question

Hello Everyone,
Good Morning !!!!
I am trying to know the exact number of rows from a view.
I have total 262 columns in a view name vw_sample. First column name is col_1 and I do not have permission to view that. but I do have permission to view all other 261 columns. I want to know fastest way to know exact number of rows in this view vw_sample.
How can i know that ?
I tried below things.
1) Tried using COUNT(*) & COUNT(1) but I don't have permission to first column col_1 so that didn't worked.
2) I do not have permission to view DMV "sys.dm_db_partition_stats"
3) I tried to execute below code.
select col_2, col_3,...col_262
into #TempTable
from vw_sample
and it gave me below error
Msg 1105, Level 17, State 2, Line 1
Could not allocate space for object '<temporary system object: 9830433781072176840>'
in database 'tempdb' because the 'PRIMARY' filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup, adding additional files to the filegroup, or setting autogrowth on for existing files in the filegroup.
4) Accidentaly I run below code
select col_2, col_3,...col_262
from vw_sample
It gave me 11 million rows in 40 minutes. As we know this method is not good to test just number of rows from a view.
So what would be my option here ?
Thanks in advance.
Thanks
Fredyy

Answer 1

Fredy, did you try with other column names instead of col1?
SELECT COUNT(col2) FROM View
What difference does that make, than using your column 1.
Please mark as answer, if this has helped you solve the issue.
Good Luck :) .. visit www.sqlsaga.com for more t-sql code snippets and BI related how to articles.
IMO, sqlsaga's answer is the way to go, but you may need to make a minor change.  When you do COUNT(<some expression>), SQL counts the number of rows where <some expression> is not NULL.  So if col2 can be NULL you need to make a change
so you know what you are counting can't be NULL.  If there is some other column in the view that can't be NULL, just count it.  Otherwise just use the ISNULL function to convert NULL's to a value.  For example, do
Select COUNT(IsNull(col2, 0)) From vw_sample
Note the above assumes that col2 is a type that contains a number (int, numeric, float, etc).  If col2 is of a different type, then just replace the 0 in the above with any valid value of the same type as col2 (so '' for varchar, '19000101' for datetime,
etc).
Tom