I'm not sure wheter this is a "better" way than the MySQL order by RAND() function, but of course you could have Perl create a "random" number (see rand) and use something like:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE id=$rand
[download]

I assume that you have a column called 'id' which contains a unique number for and $rand contains the random number generated.

You might want to benchmark both methods (and possibly more methods to come) and see what works best.

HTH