Yeah if all you are concerned with is the number of rows then use
COUNT(*).
Perhaps you could re-implement numRows() to do this, and add a big warning about performance, or is the goal to cut off bloat?
I think that it would be difficult to do this in a generic enough way at the MDB level. I've had trouble w/ using COUNT() on more complex queries -- especially where DISTINCT keyword, or other SELECT clause functions are involved. MySQL is generally very forgiving, but other RDBMS backends (e.g. SQL Server) tend to be pickier. Maybe there is a surefire regex way to get a COUNT() query for *any* SQL, in which case, this might be a good solution. I know, however, that ADOdb has had a history of some buggy behavior in the pagination code that did the COUNT() query rewrites.
Hans