Question

I have a SQL table with only two columns: “nameid” and “name”. I want to get a random name out of the database.

Before I did this via:

    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM nametable",$db);
    $number = mysql_num_rows($result);
    $random = rand(1,$number);
    list($name) = mysql_fetch_row(mysql_query("SELECT name FROM nametable WHERE nameid=$random",$db));

How can I do the same with Doctrine?

Answer 1

MySQL has a function for generating random floating point values RAND(). When sorting by this, the names will be randomly-ordered. After this, you simply select the first, randomly-ordered name.

SELECT name FROM nametable ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

With Doctrine, this could be done using

$name = Doctrine::getTable('nametable')
  ->createQuery()
  ->select('name')
  ->orderBy('RAND()')
  ->fetchOne();