David Fowler has a quick script to get a random row from a relatively small table:
A couple of times recently I’ve seen the question asked, ‘How can I select a single row at random from a table?’.
There are often a few ways of doing this suggested, most seem to rely using CTEs or temp tables. I thought I’d share, in a quick post a very simple and easy way of doing it that I’ve used a couple of times.
The script David provides requires a table scan, so it doesn’t scale out very well. But depending on your hardware, that can still be pretty efficient into the tens of thousands of rows.