Randomizing database results using php instead of mysql query

Question

I currently use EZSQL class in php to query the MySQL database. I am trying to grab random records from the database, but I would like to know if I could randomize the results via php instead of the sql query itself. The query currently looks like this:

$results = $db->get_results("SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND()");

foreach($results AS $result)
{

//code here

}

Instead could I just grab the results from the db then randomize it via php? If so, how can I do this?

Why would you want to do this? The randomization is probably faster in the database. — Gordon Linoff
– Gordon Linoff, Commented Feb 9, 2013 at 23:21
If there will be a LIMIT involved, you will go back to SQL's RAND(), which works just fine. If you think RAND() is a problem for large databases (not true) then you will have to use a LIMIT to not select billions of rows. So there you have it: ORDER BY RAND() is your only choice. — oxygen
– oxygen, Commented Feb 10, 2013 at 0:15

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:27:02Z

1

ORDER BY RAND() is not recommended: Why don't use mysql ORDER BY RAND()?

Also: http://www.titov.net/2005/09/21/do-not-use-order-by-rand-or-how-to-get-random-rows-from-table/

You can just call shuffle($results) to randomize an array

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:27

CommunityBot

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answered Feb 9, 2013 at 23:25

FoolishSeth

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Comments

mladen.plavsic · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-09 23:25:21Z

0

Agree with @shuffle, but if you really want to use PHP I wouldn't use foreach; Instead, take $results size, get random number between 0 and length-1, and use it get n-th element from array

answered Feb 9, 2013 at 23:25

mladen.plavsic

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