I'm not clear what you're looking for when you say "a count of total number of rows". Do you want to know how many rows were returned in your resultset? In that case, I'd suggest just checking how many elements you have in your @rows array, i.e.:

my (@rows) = split(/\n/, $data);
my $number_of_rows = @rows;
[download]

If, on the other hand, you want to know how many total rows are in the volume_index table (as your second attempt seems to indicate), you should probably issue another query:

my $number_of_rows = send_recv("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM volume_index");
[download]

Hope this helps.