Does MySQL actually garantee any reasonable behaviour when doing ORDER BY RAND()? C's qsort routine requires its comparison function to behave, and so does Perl.

What also might be happening is that MySQL has actually cached the results - if on a later, identical query the table content hasn't changed, it might actually serve the answer from the cache. But that's just speculation from my side.

Of course, this question has absolutely nothing to do with Perl.

Abigail