Hello,
I am a relative newbie and have been having trouble with the following statement:

SELECT DISTINCT (site), location, locationlink
FROM Links
GROUP BY `site`
ORDER BY RAND()

This does exactly what I require - takes out three fields from the 'Links' table where the 'site' field is unique. Only problem is that it pulls out the same records each time. I want it to pull out a random record from each of the records which have a particular 'site'.
For example there may be 50 records with the site 'london' - I want a random one of those 50 records - not the same one each time.

Can anyone help?

cheers,
Gary

sorry, but i have a feeling you don't understand how DISTINCT works

DISTINCT is ~not~ a function, and it applies to all columns in the SELECT clause

you wrote it with parentheses around the first column, thinking that the "distinctness" would be applied to that column...

SELECT DISTINCT (site), location, locationlink

however, in actual fact the "distinctness" applies to all columns...

SELECT DISTINCT (site), location, locationlink

furthermore, you have a GROUP BY clause confounding the issue

GROUP BY site ensures that there is exactly one result row per site, but since the other two columns in your SELECT clause are omitted from the GROUP BY clause (i.e. "hidden" from the GROUP BY clause), the values for those columns are indeterminate

see MySQL :: MySQL 5.1 Reference Manual :: 11.12.3 GROUP BY and HAVING with Hidden Columns