I need a little help

Hello all i have probably a pretty dumb one here. i need help with getting the proper count on my referrals the way i set it up was i was just going to count down the line by using the member table, i enter the referral in the member table when the new user is added, this may have been a bad idea but i figured it would save sql resources, well the problem is when i do the count it does okay unless i run accross a member who doesnt have a downline yet, say member1 has 4 referrals member2 has 3 well if the first of the 4 from member1 doesnt have any then it wont show what the next member has. i believe i need to place them in a array before using the count and im not sure of a good way to pull table information to an array. So really if someone could just show me a goodway to put information from a table into an array i could probably figure the rest out. Thanks for any help.