Quick Tip: Randomising a resultset from a SQL query

Sometimes I need a random (random enough for my purposes - I don't know, nor care, if it meets a formal definition of random) sample of N rows of data from a table. There's a very quick way to do that:

SELECT	TOP 10 *
FROM	[dbo].[ATable]
ORDER
BY	NEWID()

Ordering the data by the result of calling NEWID() seems to have very little overhead but your mileage may vary on bigger tables!