Sampling Random Rows with the ActionKit Query Builder

For a lot of database queries, we want to see all of the matching records, or perhaps only the most recent or highest based on some measure — but in a few cases, it’s actually useful to get a random sampling of the results.

There isn’t an obvious option to do this kind of sampling in the ActionKit query builder, but we can combined a couple of built-in features to make it possible:

• Open the query builder, and choose the display columns and filter criteria you need.
• In the “Display Columns” section, add a “Custom SQL” expression. Set its value to “rand()”. Hold down the shift key while clicking on the “Unsorted” button to switch this expression into “Invisible, Sort Only” mode.
• In the “Filter Criteria” section, add a “Limit to the First [100] Rows” expression, and choose the number of rows you need.

The result is a query that will find matching all of the matching records, then shuffle them into a random order, and return a subset of the rows that ended up at the front of the pack.