Comment

eng. Ilian Iliev

Really nice post, but what is the business value of this. It reminds me to the question "how can I count 8 million rows in a table". And the answer is not "Slow", it is "Why do you have to?".
Taking random entries from a million rows table will not only kill your server but it will be bad for your user`s experience. Do you like sites when the content changes on every refresh? Sound to me like "Hey, wait me to refresh this page 1000 times to show you something great"

Replies

Peter Bengtsson

E.g. you're building a customer database and you want cold callers to ring randomly selected telephone numbers.

eng. Ilian Iliev

I am not convinced it must be done by random, but maybe you`re right.
But my approach will be to take them in order and record who I called and does this lead to a purchase/contract. The chance to find returning customers is much bigger than convincing a new one if you have some reputation(lets say a 100 000 clients). In the other case when you have less customers and you are trying to find a new ones then calling them randomly has the same value as if it is done in order?