NYCPHP Meetup

[Dan Cech]

Cliff Hirsch wrote:
> I need to randomly access records from a database and have come up with
> the following solution:

After I posted my last response I realised something I'd forgotten to 
mention.

For result sets larger than a few thousand rows you will most likely get 
better mileage out of something like:

$sql = 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `sometable`';
$cnt = $db->getOne($sql);

$rnd = mt_rand(0,$cnt - 1);

$sql = 'SELECT * FROM `sometable` LIMIT '. $rnd .',1';
$row = $db->getRow($sql);

My testing on a table with 50,000 rows indicated that this method was 
twice as fast on the first run and a massive 10x as fast for subsequent 
runs.

Dan