count of records meeting condition

Forgive this question, but I'm new to rails, and my SQL is rather rusty. I have a line like so to get all records for a particular time period:

@recordings_for_period = Recording.find(:all, :order => "date_of_event DESC", :conditions => ["date_of_event >= ? AND date_of_event < ?", start_date, end_date])

Let say, instead, I just want to know the number of recordings that are available for that time period. Should I just run the above code and then get the length of the array? Or is there some construction I should be using with COUNT that would be better? (I.e., is less work for the database to process.)

Oh, and (unfortunately) I am still using rails 2.3.5.

Forgive this question, but I'm new to rails, and my SQL is rather rusty. I have a line like so to get all records for a particular time period:

@recordings_for_period = Recording.find(:all, :order => "date_of_event DESC", :conditions => ["date_of_event >= ? AND date_of_event < ?", start_date, end_date])

Let say, instead, I just want to know the number of recordings that are available for that time period. Should I just run the above code and then get the length of the array? Or is there some construction I should be using with COUNT that would be better? (I.e., is less work for the database to process.)

There's a count method that does what you want

Fred

@count_of_recordings_for_period = Recording.count(:all, :order => "date_of_event DESC", :conditions => ["date_of_event >= ? AND date_of_event < ?", start_date, end_date])

should use COUNT in the sql to give the answer you want.

Colin