SQL: SELECT random number of rows

maxtmax — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:17:19 +0000

Here’s a quick way of requesting a random number of rows from a MySQL database:

SELECT * FROM  order by rand() limit ;

tablename: is the name of the table you wish to access

n: is thenumber of rows you wish to return

Be careful though, don’t use this logic on a database with a large record, the performance will be unpleasant.

Cyrilic integration of Flex and PHP

maxtmax — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 02:57:23 +0000

A recent project involved integration between a PHP content management tool like Joomla and Adobe Flex 2. I wrote a PHP script that parsed a MySQL database creating an XML structure that was then picked up by a HTTPService in a Flex application.

The information in the database was stored in Cyrillic format, hence when ever I was loading the data in to the SWF compiled file the end result was a collection of garbage data. Setting the actuall HTML to Windows-1251 encoding did not help the situation.

My following approach was to locate a native functionality within the Flex architecture to mediate the situation. Unforchunately I wasn’t successful in aquiring sattisfying examples to solve the problem. For that matter it became sadly obvious that I haven’t seen any flash pages using non/english alphabet [either I haven't been checking international sites that much or Adobe Flex isn't widely used overseas] .

My third approach was to look at the actual php code that was generating the XML structure. I’ve discovered a useful function mb_convert_encoding that eventually solved my problems. Using a simple snippet of code:

mb_convert_encoding($string_to_convert,'UTF-8','Windows-1251');

I was able to convert the data from UTF-8 in to Windows-1251 which allowed me to display the desired Cyrillic characters.

Max Titov IV @ TechSplice » sql

SQL: SELECT random number of rows

Cyrilic integration of Flex and PHP