Tag: t-sql

A SQL Server random number generator

by Ian Blair February 23, 2019 No Comments

The first function that springs to mind is the RAND() function, but this suffers from a few drawbacks. Firstly it is only a pseudo random number and it generates values between 0 and 1. This is easily rectified by multiplying the result by the range you want, so for values between 0 and 255 the […]

T-SQL

Getting random data out of SQL Server

by Ian Blair February 23, 2019 No Comments

SQL Server is excellent for storing data and passing it back in nice ordered blocks, but what happens if you just want to take a random selection of data for example a random list of customers to test a new marketing campaign on. Since SQL2005 there has been a clause called TABLESAMPLE that will allow […]