Laravel 4.2 execute query without using elequent query builder

I have a query with sub-query .. and i want to write an explicite SQL request and execute it Query :

select count(*) as count from 
(
SELECT DISTINCT t.article_id FROM 
`articles` as a left join `tags` as t
on a.`id` = t.`article_id`
where a.`flag` = 1
) as sub

i tried this to execute the request without building the query :

DB::connection()->getPdo()->exec( $sql );

But it always return 0 !

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