Hi! I'm Jay. I have a MySQL table with a column for a question and another for the answer. The table contains several hundred rows.

What I need is to retrieve a row randomly from this table so that a question will be randomly picked and posted on a page (for an online quiz application). MySQL only offers a way of sorting the results of a query randomly. I'm avoiding this because as the table increases in size, I'll be selecting all rows then randomizing (SELECT question, answer FROM table ORDER BY RAND()).

At the moment, since I have not thought of a good algorithm, I did as what I said from above. I selected all rows then sorting the results randomly through MySQL. Each result is pushed to an array. Afterwhich I again randomized the elements in the array (because of some reasons...) then dumped them to a temporary table. From the temporary table, I then pulled my questions.

Is there a better way?

Jay

In reply to Is there a good way of retrieving entries randomly from a database (MySQL perhaps)? by soon_j

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