Randomly Select From A Database

[cool-palace-ceo]

Hello,

I have yet another issue. I am writing a simple advertisement rotator for my website and every thing is working but something could "potentially" not work.

What I am doing to select randomly a ad from the database is counting the number of rows in my database then randomly picking a number from 1 to that amount of rows and calling the banner with the id of that number.

The issue is if I delete a banner (ie: banner 4) then add a new banner it starts at 5 and not four thus having ids like this:

1,2,3,5.

So my system will see there is 4 records and if it tries to call id 4 it gets an error. So that leaves me with my question:

Is there any way to randomly select from a database?

[bobthedog]

Well - as long as you have MySQL 3.23 or higher as your database you could try the following: -

select * from table order by rand() limit 1;

I have just run a quick check and it appears to select rows randomly.

[cool-palace-ceo]

Well,

I want it to randomly pick from the name column, is that possible?

[bobthedog]

select name from tablename order by rand() limit 1;

shud do it