[SQL] Pick random rows from SELECT?

[Gilles Ganault]

Hello

	I have a working Python script that SELECTs rows from a database to
fetch a company's name from a web-based database.

Since this list is quite big and the site is the bottleneck, I'd like
to run multiple instances of this script, and figured a solution would
be to pick rows at random from the dataset, check in my local database
if this item has already been taken care of, and if not, download
details from the remote web site.

If someone's done this before, should I perform the randomization in
the SQL query (SQLite using the APSW wrapper
http://code.google.com/p/apsw/), or in Python?

Thank you.

Here's some simplified code:

sql = 'SELECT id,label FROM companies WHERE activity=1'
rows=list(cursor.execute(sql))
for row in rows:
	id = row[0]
	label = row[1]

	print strftime("%H:%M")
	url = "http://www.acme.com/details.php?id=%s" % id
	req = urllib2.Request(url, None, headers)
	response = urllib2.urlopen(req).read()
	
	name = re_name.search(response)
	if name:
		name = name.group(1)
	sql = 'UPDATE companies SET name=? WHERE id=?'
	cursor.execute(sql, (name,id) )