Question

I want I retrieve a pair of columns from the same record, in a random basis. I’ve heard that Rand is very inefficient, however, so I’d like to use a different way. (Lots of articles claims so, including http://akinas.com/pages/en/blog/mysql_random_row/).

So yeah, my title pretty much says it all.
Example:
Records:
12, James, Clarinet, Chicken
16, Billy, Drums, Bacon
15, Shane, Guitar, Pizza

The system would randomly pick a record. It’ll then
echo ‘A boy named $firstname likes $favoritefood’.

Something like that. Help?

Answer 1

Standard disclaimer about SQL injection. This should work, but I didn’t try it:

// Get the number of rows in the table
$count = mysql_fetch_assoc(mysql_query('SELECT COUNT(`id`) AS `count` FROM `table`'));
// Use those to generate a random number
$rand = rand(1,$count['count']);
// Select the two columns we need, and use limit to set the boundaries
$query = 'SELECT `firstName`, `favoriteFood` FROM `table` LIMIT '.$rand.',1';
// Run the query
if(($result = mysql_query($query)) !== FALSE) {
    // Dump the result into two variables
    list($firstname, $favoritefood) = mysql_fetch_assoc($result);
    // Echo out the result
    echo 'A boy named '.$firstname.' likes '.$favoritefood;
}