SAMPLE() is not guaranteed to give you exactly 20 rows, but might be suitable (and may perform significantly better than a full query + sort-by-random for large tables):
SELECT *
FROM table SAMPLE(20);
Note: the 20 here is an approximate percentage, not the number of rows desired. In this case, since you have 100 rows, to get approximately 20 rows you ask for a 20% sample.
1) using order by DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE clause
2) using sample([%]) function
The first way has advantage in 'CORRECTNESS' which means you will never fail get result if it actually exists, while in the second way you may get no result even though it has cases satisfying the query condition since information is reduced during sampling.
The second way has advantage in 'EFFICIENT' which mean you will get result faster and give light load to your database.
I was given an warning from DBA that my query using the first way gives loads to the database
You can choose one of two ways according to your interest!
Here's how to pick a random sample out of each group:
SELECT GROUPING_COLUMN,
MIN (COLUMN_NAME) KEEP (DENSE_RANK FIRST ORDER BY DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE)
AS RANDOM_SAMPLE
FROM TABLE_NAME
GROUP BY GROUPING_COLUMN
ORDER BY GROUPING_COLUMN;
I'm not sure how efficient it is, but if you have a lot of categories and sub-categories, this seems to do the job nicely.
In case of huge tables standard way with sorting by dbms_random.value is not effective because you need to scan whole table and dbms_random.value is pretty slow function and requires context switches. For such cases, there are 3 additional methods:
select *
from s1 sample block(1)
order by dbms_random.value
fetch first 1 rows only
ie get 1% of all blocks, then sort them randomly and return just 1 row.
2: if you have an index/primary key on the column with normal distribution, you can get min and max values, get random value in this range and get first row with a value greater or equal than that randomly generated value.
Example:
--big table with 1 mln rows with primary key on ID with normal distribution:
Create table s1(id primary key,padding) as
select level, rpad('x',100,'x')
from dual
connect by level<=1e6;
select *
from s1
where id>=(select
dbms_random.value(
(select min(id) from s1),
(select max(id) from s1)
)
from dual)
order by id
fetch first 1 rows only;
3: get random table block, generate rowid and get row from the table by this rowid:
select *
from s1
where rowid = (
select
DBMS_ROWID.ROWID_CREATE (
1,
objd,
file#,
block#,
1)
from
(
select/*+ rule */ file#,block#,objd
from v$bh b
where b.objd in (select o.data_object_id from user_objects o where object_name='S1' /* table_name */)
order by dbms_random.value
fetch first 1 rows only
)
);