Posted by Brian Dunning on 10/16/01 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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