On 21 Aug 2012, at 21:54, Fahad Khan <fahad.aj.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Dave Hodgkinson <daveh...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> Possibly a perl question. SQL would do... >> >> Given a set of data, say bands, with each having a ranking, either a >> review metric or a sales ranking, how would you retrieve a random >> row, but biased towards the higher ranking? >> >> > SELECT * FROM band ORDER BY ranking - RAND() * $BIAS DESC LIMIT 1; > > Fahad. I like this one best. I know I have 850k rows, just pick the n'th on some form of log curve.