I am running MySQL version 5.0
<code>mysql  Ver 14.12 Distrib 5.0.51a, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2</code>


On my large database (more than one million records) i wanted to pick a random article and this was amazingly slow, of course I was using the standard syntax

<code sql>select page_namespace,page_id,page_title 
from page 
where 1 order by RAND() limit 1;</code>

With a little search, I found this syntax that significatively reduces my query time.
<code sql>SELECT page_namespace,page_id,page_title 
FROM page T 
JOIN (SELECT CEIL(MAX(page_id)*RAND()) AS ID FROM page) AS x 
ON T.page_id >= x.ID LIMIT 1;</code>