You are totally right, if all I wanted to do was figure out how many total rows there were, and needed to do this often, it would make much more sense to store

You are totally right, if all I wanted to do was figure out how many total rows there were, and needed to do this often, it would make much more sense to store that number in a separate table. Unfortunately, those particular queries were just simple examples illustrating the problem --- the real program actually needed to read and use the real data. :-)