Generate random string in MySQL

Excellent tip - this would allow you to have a function for generating md5 keys for sessions instead of perl code... put it all in the db.

Thank for MYSQL random string generator help.

Really nice

Great tip!

For randomly assigned codes & passwords, we use a restricted alphabet that does not include vowels (or the digits 0 and 1 because they can resemble vowels). This is to avoid accidentally assigning a bad word, since virtually all bad words have at least one vowel.

Furthermore, our defaults are all uppercase.

Luckily we can slightly modify your tip with the mysql REPLACE and UPPER functions. Unfortunately, REPLACE doesn't seem to support regex and UPPER requires a call to CONVERT before it will work properly. So the code is a little convoluted, but it does seem to work fine...

SELECT UPPER(CONVERT(SUBSTRING(
  REPLACE(
    REPLACE(
      REPLACE(
        REPLACE(
          REPLACE(
            REPLACE(
              REPLACE(
                MD5(RAND())
              ,'1','')
            ,'0','')
          ,'a','')
        ,'e','')
      ,'i','')
    ,'o','')
  ,'u','')
FROM 1 FOR 6) USING latin1)) AS password

MD5 does not use a-z and 0-9, it uses a-f and 0-9 - only a range of 16 characters.

thanks for sharing

Very good, thank you very much !

this will use A-F and 0-9, all uppercase and isn't truly random. a better way to do this is here:
http://mysql-0v34c10ck.blogspot.com/2011/05/true-random-database-and-table-name.html

if you use this for passwords this will create only weak passwords, no special characters and lowercase uppercase combinations.

thanks