Issue with Querying Large Table

Started having the following errors as the size of my database grow. It's at about 4GB now for this table with millions of rows.

Laravel cant handle large tables?

$count = DB::table('table1')->distinct('data')->count(["data"]);
$count2 = DB::table('table2')->distinct('data')->count(["data"]);

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2014 Cannot execute queries while other unbuffered queries are active. Consider using PDOStatement::fetchAll(). Alternatively, if your code is only ever going to run against mysql, you may enable query buffering by setting the PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY attribute. (SQL: select count(distinct data) as aggregate from data)

via Chebli Mohamed