Select 2 products from each category in MySQL

Question

Pretty similar to MYSQL - select first 4 records for each category in a table but there isn\'t an accepted answer and the one answer there doesn\'t make much sense so i\'m a

Answer 1

Something along these lines will work:

SELECT id, name, category 
FROM (
  SELECT *, 
         IF( @prev <> category, 
             @rownum := 1, 
             @rownum := @rownum+1 
         ) AS rank, 
         @prev := category, 
         @rownum  
  FROM (
    SELECT * FROM products 
    ORDER BY category, rand()
  ) random_prodcts
) products_ranked 
WHERE rank <= 2;

It orders them randomly within the categories, then pulls them out tracking how many it's got from each.

Not sure how nicely it will scale though.

EDIT: Tried it with a few thousand records and it seems ok.