I think what he's trying to accomplish is not truly random, but to use the probability that's indicated in the second field of the table:
1, Aaron, 0.240 > 3, Abe, 0.006 > 13, Adrian, 0.069 > So there would be a probability of 0.240 that the call returns Aaron, a probability of 0.006 that it returns Abe, and so on. I've no clue how to do this in SQL, though, save for the utter stupidity of creating a table that repeats each name (or UID, saves memory/disk) 1000*probability times, and do a random select on that (or 100* or 10* depending on how precise you need it). I'd not recommend it, though - it's gonna be a mess and a huge performance drain. I suspect this would be better done in code, but I've been out of coding (or statistics) for too long to give pointers there. On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Baron Schwartz <ba...@xaprb.com> wrote: > Matt, > > On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Matt Neimeyer <m...@neimeyer.org> wrote: > > What's the best way to select names at random from this but still take > > into account frequency of use? > > Here's the link I usually send clients: > http://jan.kneschke.de/projects/mysql/order-by-rand/ > > -- > Baron Schwartz > Percona Inc: Services and Support for MySQL > http://www.percona.com/ > > -- > MySQL General Mailing List > For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql > To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql?unsub=vegiv...@tuxera.be > > -- Bier met grenadyn Is als mosterd by den wyn Sy die't drinkt, is eene kwezel Hy die't drinkt, is ras een ezel
