TIBQuery.RecordCount does the same thing as TIBSQL.RecordCount. Here is what Help says for TIBSQL.RecordCount: Use the RecordCount property to see how many records are returned by a query. If the result set is to return 00 rows, RecordCount will only be 00 after all the records have been visited. That is, after looking at the first record, RecordCount is , and so forth. The reason RecordCount operates in this fashion is calculating all the records in a dataset is potentially time consuming operation as it would require scanning through the entire dataset. The most efficient way to calculate the number of records in a dataset is to execute a SELECT COUNT(*) statement.