[Tutor] py-postgressql v1.0.1 question

[Rance Hall]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this or not, if there is a
better place to ask this question please let me know and I'll re-post
elsewhere.

I'm using python v3.1 and the py-postgresql v1.0.1 module located at
http://python.projects.postgresql.org/docs/1.0/

I'm using prepared sql statements like:

insertnote = db.prepare("INSERT INTO business.to_do_list (note) VALUES ($1)")
delete_note = db.prepare("DELETE FROM business.to_do_list WHERE item = $1")

so far so good, everything is working well and I understand whats going on.

But I have a situation where I want to count the number of notes in
the database, and if 0 do something, and if 1 do something else.
I have another occasion where I only want the first few records to be returned.

So for testing the idea I did this:

get_todo = db.prepare("SELECT note FROM business.to_do_list ORDER BY item")
get_todo_limit = db.prepare("SELECT note FROM business.to_do_list
ORDER BY item LIMIT 10")
get_todo_count = db.prepare("SELECT COUNT(note) AS notecount FROM
business.to_do_list")

I *think* there is a better way to do this, but I'm not seeing it in
the documentation, or its there and I'm not understanding it
correctly.

I suspect that the get_todo_count statement is not required at all.  I
have a hunch, although I can't prove yet that the result set returned
by the SQL SELECT statement will have some way to access the record
count directly

Something like this:

m = get_todo_limit()

if m.count == 0:
    do stuff
else:
    do other stuff

I can't quite narrow this down.  I'm sure its possible, It likely
depends on what python variable type is used by the py-postgresql
module, but I'm not seeing this in the docs.

Second question is more of a performance question:

I don't suspect a "large" # of items in the to_do list, so I *think*
that it would be better to just have one SQL statement and then loop
through the results 10 times to get the first few records rather than
having a seperate sql statement as I have shown here.  I'm too new at
python to have a feel for the *right* way to go about this part

Could someone point me in the right direction please?