Short answer: No, there's no other way.
HANA cannot know the record count in external resource (I think it is applicable to every software), because it has no control on it: it does not know if someone had deleted or inserted new data at remote source to update the record count in its local system table, when for HANA's own tables it can (just include this action in transaction processing).
Moreover, it is possible to have a view as a remote source (maybe table-valued functions are also allowed for some DBMSes since I do not see any difference between any SELECT
able objects from consumption point of view), so the logic of consistent rowcounts became very complicated (source database cannot report you the record count in view, because it need to calculate its output first).
Assuming it has that counts locally will cause to run select count(*) from remote_source
every N seconds which is waste of resources.
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