Hi, I'm working on a pair comparison site where a user loads a list of films and grades from another site. My site then picks two random movies and matches them against each other, the user selects the better of the two and a new pair is loaded. This gives a complete list of movies ordered by whichever is best. The database contains three tables; fm_film_data - this contains all imported movies fm_film_data(id int(11), imdb_id varchar(10), tmdb_id varchar(10), title varchar(255), original_title varchar(255), year year(4), director text, description text, poster_url varchar(255)) fm_films - this contains all information related to a user, what movies the user has seen, what grades the user has given, as well as information about each film's wins/losses for that user. fm_films(id int(11), user_id int(11), film_id int(11), grade int(11), wins int(11), losses int(11)) fm_log - this contains records of every duel that has occurred. fm_log(id int(11), user_id int(11), winner int(11), loser int(11)) To pick a pair to show the user, I've created a mySQL query that checks the log and picks a pair at random. SELECT pair.id1, pair.id2 FROM (SELECT part1.id AS id1, part2.id AS id2 FROM fm_films AS part1, fm_films AS part2 WHERE part1.id <> part2.id AND part1.user_id = [!!USERID!!] AND part2.user_id = [!!USERID!!]) AS pair LEFT JOIN (SELECT winner AS id1, loser AS id2 FROM fm_log WHERE fm_log.user_id = [!!USERID!!] UNION SELECT loser AS id1, winner AS id2 FROM fm_log WHERE fm_log.user_id = [!!USERID!!]) AS log ON pair.id1 = log.id1 AND pair.id2 = log.id2 WHERE log.id1 IS NULL ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1 This query takes some time to load, about 6 seconds in our tests with two users with about 800 grades each. I'm looking for a way to optimize this but still limit all duels to appear only once. The server runs MySQL version 5.0.90-community.