I have a number of large tables (who doesn’t) and often need to pick the smallest of a subset of these. Does MySQL store any kind of system meta-table with information on the size of user-created tables? Then I could query that instead of re-counting each row each time I need to find the smallest. How is this information best accessed?

Many thanks!

MySQL doesn't expose any MetaData that I know about, but I'd love to hear if you find any!

-PatP

Just because a table has the "smallest" row count, does NOT mean that this table is necessarily the smallest in total size.
A table with only two rows which contain "large" BLOB datatypes
could easily be the largest table in the DB.