Yes, this question is a little ambiguous. Bernie just wanted you to pick an arbitrary user and return their number of statuses. On the topic of statuses, the repeating statuses were a bit misleading. Although the text repeated, each status has a unique id, so they should be treated as distinct statuses. I appreciate that you accounted for this. As far as your query is concerned, only the count was asked for, so you didn't need users.name which would have done away with the need for the left join (which should have been an inner join, because we didn't want any users that didn't have a status. Although, that situation didn't exist in this instance). Perhaps your query would be faster without these additional elements.