Question

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MySQL select 10 random rows from 600K rows fast

There are many varying examples across the web, but I am hoping someone has a solution that fits what I am looking for… Surely I cannot be the only one!

I am building a photography website and want to display 50+ image thumbnails on the landing page. The kicker is that I want it to display pictures randomly using PHP and without duplication. I also want each image to have its own, unique href and title params.

So, I have created a mySQL table that holds:

id image_path, image_href, image_title

I was figuring I would easily re-size the images on my own and put them in a folder in the root directory and then call it in the row image_path.

Does anyone have an idea how to do this the most efficient way? I have heard that rand() sucks when the database gets big. The database will grow to tens of thousands of images.

Let me know if you need/want clarification.

Thanks!!!

Edit: I may have come across the answer in my research, but I’m pretty new to PHP… 🙂

Answer 1

You could query the database, sort the results by RAND() and select the top 50:

SELECT id, image_path, image_href, image_title 
FROM table 
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 50

This guarantees no duplicate results unless your table itself has duplicates.

A faster method is outlined in this question: MySQL select 10 random rows from 600K rows fast