HOW TO SELECT RANDOM ROWS IN MYSQL

The easiest way to generate random rows in MySQL is to use the ORDER BY RAND() clause.

SELECT col1 FROM tbl ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 10;

This can work fine for small tables. However, for big table, it will have a serious performance problem as in order to generate the list of random rows, MySQL need to assign random number to each row and then sort them.
Even if you want only 10 random rows from a set of 100k rows, MySQL need to sort all the 100k rows and then, extract only 10 of them.

My solution for this problem, is to use RAND in the WHERE clause and not in the ORDER BY clause. First, you need to calculate the fragment of your desired result set rows number from the total rows in your table. Second, use this fragment in the WHERE clause and ask only for RAND numbers that smallest (or equal) from this fragment.

For example, suppose you have a table with 200K rows and you need only 100 random rows from the table. The fragment of the result set from the total rows is: 100 / 200k = 0.0005.
The query will look like:

SELECT col1 FROM tbl WHERE RAND()<=0.0005;

In order to get exactly 100 row in the result set, we can increase the fragment number a bit and limit the query:
For example:

SELECT col1 FROM tbl WHERE RAND()<=0.0006 limit 100;

Feel free to leave a comment.