How would I order RAND() selections?

[Shpigford]

How would I go about alphabetizing random items from the database? For example, I have say 500 rows in my database. I want to randomly select 10 to display at any given time but I want to alphabetize them. How would I do that? I've tried the following which didn't really work at all:

SELECT * FROM nodes WHERE parentid='289814' ORDER BY RAND(),'name' LIMIT 0,10 

[r937]

since you need ORDER BY RAND() to do the randome selection, you will need to sort them by name some other way

the best way would be:

select * 
  from (
       SELECT * FROM nodes 
        WHERE parentid='289814' 
       ORDER BY RAND()
       LIMIT 0,10 
       )
order by name

but of course mysql won't support that until 4.1 (sorry, can't test it for you, don't have 4.1 myself)

you could use a temp table, or, since there are only 10 rows, sort them with your scripting language