Random Snippets

I was looking for a way to order the rows randomly in a MySQL query and the solution was not easy for me to come by. I am posting the solution here in hopes of helping others.

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SELECT *
FROM my_table
ORDER BY RAND()

RAND() returns a random floating-point value but functions to randomly order the selection [...]

Let’s say you have the following PHP code that extracts the date from the times table in your MySQL database. The date is of timestamp type which has the following format: ‘YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS’ or ‘2008-10-05 21:34:02.’

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$res = mysql_query("SELECT date FROM times;");
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) {
echo $row[’date’] . "<br />";
}

Let’s say you have the following table called votes that keeps track of how people voted and you want a query to count the number of votes for you instead of having to loop through all the rows with a counter in PHP.

person
vote

obama
yes

mccain
no

obama
yes

obama
no

mccain
yes

obama
yes

obama
yes

obama
no

mccain
no