Indices for select count(*)?

Hi, thank you for your answer.

Regarding the performance flow when trying to find out how many records
are currently being stored in the table, I don't see how an index should
help... Nevertheless we've created an unique index on "ID" but SELECT
count("ID") from "XYZ" still takes 35 seconds*. (ID is the primary key
basing on a sequence, select count(*) isn't faster.)

So - what kind of indexing would speed this up then?

Thanx in advance!

Alexander.

*) MSSQL 2005 on the same server takes 4 seconds for this query for the
analogue table, and there hasn't any special tuning been applied, too.