You don't need the while() loop if you only want to fetch one row.

You can do just:

You don't need a "while" statement as you're returning only 1 row.
You should always check to make sure that $result is populated before reading a value from it.

this sql's results only 1 record.

and

u must use a field name in COUNT() function for performance. like:

SELECT COUNT(this) FROM my_table WHERE this='$this'

http://www.morad.info/

There is another way you can do this. Here is how I would do it, it doesnt use MySQL to do the count, instead it uses PHP.