"COUNT() returns 0 if there were no matching rows." .... really?!

Hi all I am 99.9% sure it is my lack of understanding something, but it sure seems like my PHP/MySQL code is returning something other than what i expect from reading the docs. to explain: this code is serving me (almost perfectly) well: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- $query = "SELECT COUNT(*) AS CountRowsThisDateThisTBL, date(solarLandingDateTime) AS uniqueDate, 't7solar_landing' AS tableAlias FROM t7solar_landing GROUP BY date(solarLandingDateTime) UNION ALL SELECT count(*) AS CountRowsThisDateThisTBL, date(solarAweberConfDateTime) AS uniqueDate, 'aweber_7solar_confirm' AS tableAlias FROM aweber_7solar_confirm GROUP BY date(solarAweberConfDateTime) UNION ALL SELECT count(*) AS CountRowsThisDateThisTBL, date(solarAWDateTime) AS uniqueDate, 'aweber_7solar_aw' AS tableAlias FROM aweber_7solar_aw GROUP BY date(solarAWDateTime) ORDER BY uniqueDate DESC LIMIT 300"; $foundUniqueDateROWS = mysql_query($query) or die("query failed: " .mysql_error()); while ($uniqueDateROW = mysql_fetch_object($foundUniqueDateROWS)) { $CountRowsThisDateThisTBL=0; $uniqueDate=htmlentities($uniqueDateROW->uniqueDate); $tableAlias=htmlentities($uniqueDateROW->tableAlias); $CountRowsThisDateThisTBL=htmlentities($uniqueDateROW-

CountRowsThisDateThisTBL);

$TBLsubarray["$uniqueDateROW->tableAlias"]=$CountRowsThisDateThisTBL; $BuildPerUniqueDateArray[$uniqueDateROW->uniqueDate]=$TBLsubarray; } ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ...but I am having the problem, that on iterations of the while loop where there are NO records in one of those tables on a particular date (when the *other* tables *do* have records for that date), then the variable $CountRowsThisDateThisTBL seems to persist its previous value (from what it was on the last iteration for the same table (previous date, same table), as opposed to what I would expect (that it should be set to "0" since count() should be returning "0" for this iteration. What am I missing? Here's an example (snip) from a var_dump of that $BuildPerUniqueDateArray: (note that the 'aweber_7solar_aw' table does NOT have a record for the date '2009-07-28', so I would expect to see that "1" to be a "0" there.) ["2009-07-29"]=> array(3) {

    ["aweber_7solar_aw"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["t7solar_landing"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["aweber_7solar_confirm"]=>
    string(1) "1"

} ["2009-07-28"]=> array(3) {

    ["aweber_7solar_aw"]=>
    string(1) "1"
    ["t7solar_landing"]=>
    string(1) "5"
    ["aweber_7solar_confirm"]=>
    string(1) "2"

thanks, -Govinda