Selecting Random Rows in MySQL

At the time of this writing I have implemented a tile based home page. I populate a number of these tiles by pulling random blog posts. I was a little shocked when it occurred to me I have never had a reason to retrieve random data. I hashed out a few solutions in my head, but they seemed a little less than elegant; a quick search of the MySQL's documentation gave my the answer I was looking for. RAND(), more specifically, ORDER BY RAND(). In my case, I want six random blog posts so the query would look like this.

SELECT
    title,     
    slug 
FROM 
    contents 
WHERE
    content_status = 'published' 
AND
    content_type = 'posts' 
ORDER BY RAND() 
LIMIT 6;

Since jasonsnider.com runs on top of CakePHP my final implementation is as follows. Note: if you're using CakePHP but not MySQL, this may not work. Check the documentation of your DBMS for some alternative syntax.

$this->Post->find(
    'all', 
    array( 
        'fields'=>array(
            'title',
            'slug'
        ),
        'conditions' => array(
            'Post.content_status' => 'published'
        ), 
        'order' => 'rand()',
        'limit' => 6,
    )
);
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