What are the potential pitfalls of using the count function in MySQL with PHP?

When using the count function in MySQL with PHP, one potential pitfall is that it may return a result set with a single row containing the count value as a column. This can make it challenging to access the count value directly in your PHP code. To solve this issue, you can use the fetchColumn method to retrieve the count value directly from the result set.

// Connect to the database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=database_name', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare and execute the SQL query
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table_name");
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the count value directly
$count = $stmt->fetchColumn();

// Output the count value
echo "Total count: " . $count;