Question

I need to query my database and partially order and randomize the results.
For instance,

SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY views DESC LIMIT 5

would result something like this:

id   name       views
---------------------
 0   Product #1     2
 1   Product #2     1
 2   Product #3     0
 3   Product #4     0
 4   Product #5     0

Now, how can I add RAND() (or something similar) in the query so that the last three items (Products #3, #4 and #5) would appear in random order since they’ve got the same amount of views, but the first two still descending based on the same views-field?

I tried something like

SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY views, RAND() DESC LIMIT 5

but obviously it doesn’t work.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

SELECT * FROM products ORDER BY views DESC, RAND() LIMIT 5;

maybe … you can retrieve the records first then sort randomly using other programming language