Sometimes all you need from a data base is a single value, which could be a count, sum, average, or other aggregated value from a data set. Performing an ExecuteReader and calculating the result in your code is not the most efficient way to do this. The best choice is to let the data base perform the work and return just the single value you need. The following example shows how to do this with the ExecuteScalar method:
// 1. Instantiate a new command SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("select count(*) from Categories", conn); // 2. Call ExecuteNonQuery to send command int count = (int)cmd.ExecuteScalar();
The query in the SqlCommand constructor obtains the count of all records from the Categories table. This query will only return a single value. The ExecuteScalar method in step 2 returns this value. Since the return type of ExecuteScalar is type object, we use a cast operator to convert the value to int.