Thanks everyone for responses. 'Twas brillig, and Nathan Rixham at 20/08/10 13:17 did gyre and gimble: > if you use mysql you can seed rand() with a number to get the same > random results out each time (for that seed number) > > SELECT * from table ORDER BY RAND(234) > > Then just use limit and offset as normal. This is a neat trick! Yeah that will avoid the need for the static lookup table with 32 randomised columns. Jon's strategy is more or less a simplified version of my 32-column randomising table (i.e. just have 1 column of random data rather than 32). I would personally prefer to reduce the refresh of this data as I don't like to annoy people when the change over day happens. The RAND(seed) approach will probably work well (not sure of performance verses an indexed table, but I can easily experiment with this). If I use the numbers 1..32 as my seed, then I still get the same net result as a 32 column table. If I just change my "seed offset" then I get the same result as re-generating my random data tables. >From an operational perspective, RAND(seed) is certainly easier. I'll certainly look into this. Many thanks. Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mandriva Linux Contributor [http://www.mandriva.com/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/] -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
