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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 of rows in the above usage.

If you combine the query with LIMIT, you will end up with a random selection of rows from your table.

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SELECT * 
FROM my_table
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 3

Assuming you have more than 3 rows in your table, you will always get 3 random rows from the query.

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

This date format that is in the output is in the timestamp format, 2008-10-05 21:34:02, which is not surprising, but you want something that is more “user-friendly” or “readable” as in “9:34 pm October 5, 2008.”

Let’s go back to the drawing board and try again:

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$res = mysql_query("SELECT date FROM times;");
while ( $row = mysql_fetch_array($res) ) {
   echo date("g:i a F j, Y ", strtotime($row["date"])) . "<br />";
}

A sample output from this PHP code would be 9:34 pm October 5, 2008 which is much more user-friendly.

The PHP strtotime function parses the MySQL timestamp into a Unix timestamp which can be utilized for further parsing or formatting in the PHP date function.

Here are some other sample date output formats that may be of practical use:

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echo date("F j, Y g:i a", strtotime($row["date"]));                  // October 5, 2008 9:34 pm
echo date("m.d.y", strtotime($row["date"]));                         // 10.05.08
echo date("j, n, Y", strtotime($row["date"]));                       // 5, 10, 2008
echo date("Ymd", strtotime($row["date"]));                           // 20081005
echo date('\i\t \i\s \t\h\e jS \d\a\y.', strtotime($row["date"]));   // It is the 5th day.
echo date("D M j G:i:s T Y", strtotime($row["date"]));               // Sun Oct 5 21:34:02 PST 2008

Here is the MySQL query that would do just the job.

SELECT person,
SUM(IF(vote = "yes", 1,0)) AS `yes_votes`,
SUM(IF(vote = "no", 1,0)) AS `no_votes`,
COUNT(vote) AS `total`
FROM votes
GROUP BY person
ORDER BY yes_votes DESC


The following would be the result of the query:

The beauty of the query all lies in the SUM IF statements. For example, in order to count the yes votes, the IF statement will check to see if vote = “yes” as it loops through all the rows. If so, the yes_votes column alias is incremented by 1. The same procedure goes for counting the no votes. The COUNT statements keeps a tally on the total number of votes. The GROUP BY person statement allows the vote counters to calculate the numbers by person instead of the total number of yes and no votes.

Now, you do not have to loop through your MySQL results to count column values =)