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Category: Databases
Random Order

Does anyone know of SQL (MySQL compatible) call that will allow me to return the results of a query in random order?

SELECT blah,blah,blah FROM stuff WHERE statement="true" ORDER BY (RANDOM);

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Luke Bowerman
new media arts
www.judebowerman.com/nma (http://www.judebowerman.com/nma)

I dont know if you can return random selctions but one way round it would be do generate a random number, assign each number to a column name and then do an order by $val ($val being your random number/column name), to increase the 'randomness', as it where, generate more than one number and order the columns by eg column 1, then column 5, then column 6, so it would look something like this

select * from stuff where statement="true" order by '$val1', '$val2', '$val3';


------------------
cheers


[This message has been edited by timbo (edited February 08, 2000).]

Thanks very much, that gives me a path to pursue.


Now all I have to do is figure out how to get PHP to create some confined random variables.

------------------
Luke Bowerman
new media arts
www.judebowerman.com/nma (http://www.judebowerman.com/nma)

try

$change=mt_rand(1,3);
$val=mt_rand(1,3);
$val2=mt_rand(4,6);
$val3=mt_rand(7,9);
if ($change=="1")
{
echo $val."--".$val2."--".$val3;
}
elseif ($change=="2")
{
echo $val3."--".$val."--".$val2;
}
else
{
echo $val2."--".$val3."--".$val;
}

hth

t

------------------
cheers


[This message has been edited by timbo (edited February 09, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by timbo (edited February 09, 2000).]

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND(100)










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