[development] Drupal 7 Entities - view random node

[nan wich]

Thanks, Larry, that make me feel a bit better.

The suggestion is to keep a separate table of applicable nodes, generate a 
random number from the number of records, and get that record. Your explanation 
seems to indicate that one is simply spreading the "overhead" out over time - 
and probably increasing it in total, maybe. Given that the block can be 
refreshed on every page load, and a new node created relatively infrequently, I 
can also see that there may be some merit when the number of nodes gets fairly 
large. Maybe something like "SELECT n.* FROM {quotes_random} r INNER JOIN {node} 
n ON n.nid = r.nid WHERE r.row_num = 1 + RAND() * (SELECT MAX(row_num) FROM 
{quotes_random})". (Sorry for the D6 version; it would take me a much longer 
time to construct in D7.) 


Nancy
 
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.



________________________________

From: Larry Garfield
I don't know that I've ever tried it with 12k nodes so I can't say from 
experience.

Randomization is a tricky subject.  The common method, which Views uses as 
does the ->orderRandom() method of DBTNG, boils down to adding a random number 
as a new column for each record, ordering by that, and then (in this case) 
discarding all but the first record.  That involves a linear-growth creation 
for the new column (a fixed additional cost per record) and then an integer 
ordering.  Assuming the sorting function in the SQL database is sane (which if 
it isn't you need a new database), that should be an n*log n algorithm.  
(That's as fast as a sorting algorithm can get.)
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