Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Fetching Random Rows From SQL Server

Fetching Random Rows From SQL Server
Recently I needed to fetch random rows from a SQL server table. If you have an integer column then using RAND() function goes well. However in my case there was no number column. In such cases you can use the following query:

SELECT TOP
FROM
WHERE
ORDER BY NEWID()The key is the use of NEWID() function that returns a GUID. An example query would look something like this:

SELECT TOP 10 *
FROM Employees
ORDER BY NEWID()This way is also useful for selecting data for testing purposes.
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