Doesn't make sense to query the db for a count of the number of records that are returned. You can figure that out from the result set inside your application.

If the result set is "all users", you probably don't want to pull tens or hundreds of millions of records just to count them up if you're showing 100 per page.

I think that something like a query for hundreds of millions of records that also required pagination for the exact number of records returned is anomalous and not something that their application would do.

You aren't keeping the count somewhere else, in a cache, let's say?

Sure, but even if you're caching, you're presumably populating that "how many users do we have" widget's cache at least once a day or so.

Specifically in this case, there's no reason to show a list of all of the users in the system. What would you do with a list with millions of rows?

A search makes more sense here.

> What would you do with a list with millions of rows?

Not much, but that doesn't mean folks won't.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions says "17,335,212 questions " and the pagination goes "1 2 3 4 5 … 346705", if you want a real-world example.