Randomly pick rows from table

[dbmsuser7]

How can one randomly pick rows from a table?

A stackoverflow thread (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5806 ... ows-in-sql) suggests

Code: Select all

SELECT column FROM table
ORDER BY RANDOM()
LIMIT 1

in the case of one row, for PostgreSQL. The same code seems to work in Vertica, though I don't have the time to try to verify it by looking at tests of randomness.

Anyone have a problem with this code snippet?

[id10t]

Hi!

[DELETED]

[dbmsuser7]

I have no, but book Sql Antipatterns does.

OK...seems like what he didn't like about it was that it doesn't scale well. I'm only doing some spot-checking, so scaling isn't really a concern for me.

May be this thread will interest you too:
Selecting a Random Set of Rows from a Table

I'll check that out.