Could you use a variation of the following (perhaps a syntactically correct version would be better than mine) to let the DBMS itself do the counting? It would be far more efficient, as it only has to return a single result to you, rather than a set of results that you then iterate over. You could modify it to count the various items you want.

  SELECT count(*)
  FORM   table1
  WHERE  day='$d'
    AND  month='$m_num'
    AND  year='$y'
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