These specific tricks do exist for every database. But there is no reason for mssql to not handle count(*) and count(1) the same, they are the same. Maybe they

These specific tricks do exist for every database. But there is no reason for mssql to not handle count(*) and count(1) the same, they are the same. Maybe they are already the same and it‘s just a very old trick which has been replaced by a better query optimizer.