|  | Posted by Brian Dunning on 07/01/01 11:14 
I have a MySQL database with about a million records. I'd like to use  the SQL command "order by RAND()" but my ISP won't let me: whenever
 the server gets spidered, Google overloads their MySQL server because
 of all the overhead of that command. I can't just cloak the spiders
 because I need them to find the random pages.
 
 So...what I've been doing for small sets of records is to use PHP to
 generate a bunch of random record ID's, then I construct a long SQL
 statement to find all the matching records. This works, but if I want
 to generate a big index page to list a hundred or a thousand records,
 it could get pretty clunky.
 
 Anyone have any better suggestions?   :)
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