Imagine you have a Product table, where you need to get a list of say 5 random products. This is how you can do it:

select top 5 *
from Product
order by newid();

So what actually happens is that newid() returns a new GUID/unique identifier for every row in the result set, it then sorts based on the GUID value and then eventually selects the 5 top most rows.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 10:09 pm and is filed under SQL Server, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.