Randomize Output

[Chris Taylor]

I am pulling records from a database. I want to randomly pull 10 records out
of the hundreds in the database to display.

How can this be done?

Thanks!

[Pete Thomas]

A couple of ways comes to mind. Either extract your ten random records from
the big query (could be slow with lots of data) OR apply an index to the
records and use 10 random number in your WHERE statement to just get your 10
records returned. You would have to create a 'while loop' just in case your
random function returned a duplicate

[Stressed_Simon]

I wrote a custom tag recently to do this, you can download it here!

[url]http://www.simonbaynes.com/Blog.cfm?action=day&day=3&month=6&year=2005[/url]

[stpaz]

if you are using SQL server the quickest way woudl be to use the following in
you SQL newID is a SQL server function the..... creates a random ID

SELECT TOP 10 *
FROM Contact
ORDER BY NEWID()