Question

I am having a hard time with this very simple project. Maybe it’s because it’s Monday, I’m not sure.

I have a table that looks like this:

id        |        weight        |    hits
------------------------------------------------
    1     |         4            |     0
    2     |         1            |     0
    3     |         2            |     0

Obviously, the hits column will increment by 1 each time that particular record is selected (We will run this update from within our PHP script).

How can I best retrieve these records by their weight? What I mean is that if I ran my query 15 times, I would want the following IDs returned:

1
1
1
1
3
3
2
1
1
1
1
3
3
2
1

We have a simple formula in place that we got online that retrieves a random weighted result, but we aren’t running the formula enough to statistically balance out the results, so instead we need to do a simple rotation as described above.

I know that this is a simple problem to solve, but I’m having a hard time coming up with the best way to do it today.

I hope I’ve been clear enough in my description of the problem.

Answer 1

Unless I’m missing something (it is Monday here too after all), can’t you just sort by hits / weight and LIMIT 1?