  We study an extension of first-order logic that allows to express cardinality
conditions in a similar way as SQL's COUNT operator. The corresponding logic
FOC(P) was introduced by Kuske and Schweikardt (LICS'17), who showed that query
evaluation for this logic is fixed-parameter tractable on classes of structures
(or databases) of bounded degree. In the present paper, we first show that the
fixed-parameter tractability of FOC(P) cannot even be generalised to very
simple classes of structures of unbounded degree such as unranked trees or
strings with a linear order relation.
  Then we identify a fragment FOC1(P) of FOC(P) which is still sufficiently
strong to express standard applications of SQL's COUNT operator. Our main
result shows that query evaluation for FOC1(P) is fixed-parameter tractable
with almost linear running time on nowhere dense classes of structures. As a
corollary, we also obtain a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for counting
the number of tuples satisfying a query over nowhere dense classes of
structures.
