Best Way to check that table is empty

[gandolf989]

I don't think I'd subscribe to this as "best practice" - it is taking a sledge-hammer to a nut. And Tamil will find it much too slow

I ran this on a table that has over 5 million rows and could see no difference bewteen the three execution plans. They each ran in about 0 seconds. But I still wasn't convinced, so I ran the above with DBMS_PROFILER, and found out that the explicit cursor is some fraction of a millisecond faster than the select into. Who would have thunk it!!!!

So in some small and inconsequential way, I was right!!!!!!!!!