Question

Just got a quick question, this is a simple thing to do via PHP but I’m pretty sure there has to be a way to do it via MySQL.

I’ve got a table with the columns id, element_id, video_link, views among a few others.

What I want to do select one out of the top 5 most viewed videos at random.

E.g

SELECT *
  FROM table_name
 WHERE "In human terms order by views descending and then select 1 of the top 5 at random"

It’s really simple to do via PHP and I will use that if there isn’t a way to do it via MySQL but it would be nice to know!

Answer 1

SELECT *
FROM (
    SELECT *
    FROM `tablename`
    ORDER BY id DESC
    LIMIT 5
) AS inner_table
ORDER BY RAND( )