Selecting a random record every X hours

[tHud]

Hello

 

I would like to be able to 'feature' a certain product every 'x' hours (or perhaps daily).

 

As far as I can see, this seems to work on an 'instantaneous' basis...

 

SELECT * FROM `products` ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 0,1; 

 

Is there a way that I could adapt this to work with a time-frame? Maybe 12 hourly? Or daily?

 

Thanks for looking

[fenway]

I don't understand -- you want to run the query every X, or the result to be based upon X?

[tHud]

Hi

Well, I don't really want to involve cron, but it does need to be executed perhaps by the time of day...? (thinking aloud here)

 

So I'm thinking... the result to be based upon X

[fenway]

That still means you want a query to run periodically -- 5.1 has an event scheduler built-in.

[tHud]

Thanks for that.

Unfortunately, my shared hosting uses MySQL 4.1.22-standard-log - but I will Google it for future reference.

[fenway]

Then cron is your only option.