When you need to find if any records exist in a table or a selective snap shot of a table, you are prehaps like me in using the COUNT(*) SQL transaction and see if there are zero counts, but is this the most efficient method?

After a performance issue on one of my applications I found a new extension to LINQ to SQL called ANY(), from Ray Booysen on StackOverflow, here is an example of the SQL that is generated from LINQ:

The Results:

SELECT COUNT(*) AS [value] FROM [dbo].[Employees] AS [t0]

9

SELECT (CASE WHEN EXISTS(SELECT NULL AS [EMPTY] FROM [dbo].[Employees] AS [t0]) THEN 1 ELSE 0 END) AS [value]

True