Re: random record mysql

According to New Riders "MySQL" (by Paul DuBois): If your MySQL is 2.23.3 or later, you could just use ORDER BY RAND() in your select clause, then get the first record. Prior to that, you would need to do something like: SELECT ..., age*0+RAND() as rand_col FROM ... ORDER BY rand_col Appearently, the "age*0+" bit keeps the optimizer from treating the RAND() as generating a constant value (and therefore optimizing the ORDER BY clause out of the query). If you want to do the random search *after* the query and your php is older than 4.2.0, you need to make sure you seed php's random number generator with srand() or mt_srand() before using rand() or mt_rand(). --- Seairth Jacobs seairth@seairth.com "Tbo" <tim@copiousdg.com> wrote in message news:20030425004145.20649.qmail@pb1.pair.com... > For the life of me I cannot figure out how to get a random record to be > displayed off a record set using mysql and php. I have seen examples of the > rand() function but it only brings up the first record in the record set. > Any ideas or tutorials? Please help!!!! :)