Question

Let us say I have a table called animals that looks like this:

1 red     fox
2 blue    elephant
3 red     dog
4 yellow  cat
5 green   mouse
6 blue    rat

In effect what I would like to do is make a temporary table (a virtual table) that only contains rows of the value I specify. For example red:

1 red     fox
3 red     dog

and then grab a random row from this virtual table.

What I don’t want to do is to permanently create these tables and have to constantly update them grabbing information from the main animals table. I would like to do this on the fly and quickly using some sort of subquery, view, temporary table or whatever you would like to call it.

Please keep in mind that I am a complete php noob and could use as much clarification as possible involving syntax.

Answer 1

You can use a sql query like following

SELECT * FROM table
where color = 'red'
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1 

You can change limit to any number of rows that you want to fetch