Random record from the table - mysql

Question

I have customer table with 10 columns. In the table customer id is repeated. I need to take only one record every customer but randomly.
Let suppose customer table contain total 10000 records. But distinct customers is only 500.
So i need only 500 distinct customer data randomly.
I am using mysql 5.7.

Answer 1

Consider the following...
SELECT * FROM my_table;
+----+-------------+
| id | customer_id |
+----+-------------+
| 1 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 6 | 2 |
| 7 | 1 |
| 8 | 4 |
| 9 | 5 |
| 10 | 2 |
| 11 | 3 |
| 12 | 1 |
| 13 | 4 |
+----+-------------+
SELECT id
, customer_id
FROM
( SELECT id
, customer_id
, CASE WHEN #prev=customer_id THEN #i:=#i+1 ELSE #i:=1 END i
, #prev:=customer_id
FROM
( SELECT id
, customer_id
FROM my_table
ORDER
BY customer_id
, RAND()
) x
JOIN (SELECT #prev:=null,#i:=0) vars
) n
WHERE i = 1
ORDER
BY customer_id;
-- sample output, different each time --
+----+-------------+
| id | customer_id |
+----+-------------+
| 12 | 1 |
| 10 | 2 |
| 3 | 3 |
| 8 | 4 |
| 9 | 5 |
+----+-------------+

Answer 2

You do not want to ORDER BY RAND() because that will be extremely slow for a large table because it will actually sort all of those random records.
Instead pick a random int less than the number of rows in the table (random_num_less_than_row_count) and do this which is faster but not perfect.
SELECT * FROM atable LIMIT $random_num_less_than_row_count, 1
Or if u have a primary key that is an auto_increment you can pick a random int less than the highest id in the table (random_num_less_than_last_id) do the following which is pretty fast.
SELECT * FROM atable WHERE id >= $random_num_less_than_last_id ORDER BY id ASC LIMIT 1
I did a >= and an ORDER BY id ASC so that if you are missing ids you'll still get a result. But if you have many large gaps you need the slower first option above.

Answer 3

Not sure about it but it is a beginner level query which might to get the desired result
SELECT Distinct column FROM table
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 500
PS: This code isn't in mysql 5.7. And if anyone have a better query more than happy to get corrected