How to retrieve a row, biased by populatity?

[Fahad Khan]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:22 PM, Dave Hodgkinson <davehodg at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Possibly a perl question. SQL would do...
>
> Given a set of data, say bands, with each having a ranking, either a
> review metric or a sales ranking, how would you retrieve a random
> row, but biased towards the higher ranking?
>
>
SELECT * FROM band ORDER BY ranking - RAND() * $BIAS DESC LIMIT 1;

Fahad.