Question

The title doesn’t actually fully describes the problem, that is: I have a table with dates –

 1. 2011-07-01 13:01:48
 2. 2011-07-01 13:09:36 
 3. 2011-07-01 13:21:24
 4. 2011-07-01 13:35:12
 5. 2011-07-01 13:49:23
 6. 2011-07-01 13:57:47
 7. 2011-07-01 14:05:12
 8. 2011-07-01 14:12:45
 9. 2011-07-01 14:31:48
 10. 2011-07-01 14:47:31

and so on. What I need is to get three random dates of each hour, for example:

 1. 2011-07-01 13:01:48
 2. 2011-07-01 13:21:24
 3. 2011-07-01 13:49:23
 4. 2011-07-01 14:05:12
 5. 2011-07-01 14:12:45
 6. 2011-07-01 14:47:31

How can I do it in mysql?

Answer 1

This should work quite well if you have statistically enough rows per hour:

select *
from (
    select *
    from yourtable
    order by rand()
)
group by date(yourdate), hour(yourdate), floor(rand()*3)