Is using ORDER BY RAND() a best practice for selecting random data in PHP, and why?

Using ORDER BY RAND() in SQL queries is not considered a best practice for selecting random data in PHP because it can be inefficient for large datasets. Instead, a more efficient way to retrieve random data is to fetch all the data and then randomly shuffle the result set in PHP. This ensures better performance and scalability. 

// Fetch data from the database
$query = "SELECT * FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($query);

// Fetch all rows into an array
$data = $result->fetch_all(MYSQLI_ASSOC);

// Shuffle the array to get random data
shuffle($data);

// Retrieve random data from the shuffled array
$randomData = $data[0]; // Get the first element for randomness

// Use $randomData for further processing

Keywords

ORDER BY RAND() random data PHP best practice performance

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