How to request a random row in SQL?

See this post: SQL to Select a random row from a database table. It goes through methods for doing this in MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and Oracle (the following is copied from that link):

Select a random row with MySQL:

SELECT column FROM table
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1

Select a random row with PostgreSQL:

SELECT column FROM table
ORDER BY RANDOM()
LIMIT 1

Select a random row with Microsoft SQL Server:

SELECT TOP 1 column FROM table
ORDER BY NEWID()

Select a random row with IBM DB2

SELECT column, RAND() as IDX 
FROM table 
ORDER BY IDX FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY

Select a random record with Oracle:

SELECT column FROM
( SELECT column FROM table
ORDER BY dbms_random.value )
WHERE rownum = 1

Solutions like Jeremies:

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

work, but they need a sequential scan of all the table (because the random value associated with each row needs to be calculated - so that the smallest one can be determined), which can be quite slow for even medium sized tables. My recommendation would be to use some kind of indexed numeric column (many tables have these as their primary keys), and then write something like:

SELECT * FROM table WHERE num_value >= RAND() * 
    ( SELECT MAX (num_value ) FROM table ) 
ORDER BY num_value LIMIT 1

This works in logarithmic time, regardless of the table size, if num_value is indexed. One caveat: this assumes that num_value is equally distributed in the range 0..MAX(num_value). If your dataset strongly deviates from this assumption, you will get skewed results (some rows will appear more often than others).

I don't know how efficient this is, but I've used it before:

SELECT TOP 1 * FROM MyTable ORDER BY newid()

Because GUIDs are pretty random, the ordering means you get a random row.