Jay, If you're going to offer advice, at least do some basic research to make sure it's accurate.
Firstly, having a column that has a random number in it and sorting by it produces the same output each time you query on it - obviously unsatisfactory and I would have thought, manor from heaven for card counters everywhere!! Secondly, the standard SQLite function random() is actually seeded by the current time and date every time you open a database. Steve p.s. Sorry, been down the pub..... -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] rg] On Behalf Of Jay Sprenkle Sent: 17 January 2006 14:09 To: sqlite-users@sqlite.org; Clark Christensen Subject: [RBL] Re: [sqlite] Randomly ordering results On 1/16/06, Clark Christensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > So, I have to ask, is this the right way to implement such functionality? Is there a better, or more efficient way? The standard method of ordering a list randomly that doesn't return duplicates is to add a column for each of the items. Assign a random number to the column. The return the list sorted by the random number. It's used extensively for shuffling cards, etc. You should be aware that the standard random number functions of most languages return the same sequence of results for the same 'seed' value. So you generally have to do something like set the seed using the current clock so you get a different set of random numbers for each run of your program.
