Generating random strings with T-SQL

Question

If you wanted to generate a pseudorandom alphanumeric string using T-SQL, how would you do it? How would you exclude characters like dollar signs, dashes, and slashes from

Answer 1

If you are running SQL Server 2008 or greater, you could use the new cryptographic function crypt_gen_random() and then use base64 encoding to make it a string. This will work for up to 8000 characters.

declare @BinaryData varbinary(max)
    , @CharacterData varchar(max)
    , @Length int = 2048

set @BinaryData=crypt_gen_random (@Length) 

set @CharacterData=cast('' as xml).value('xs:base64Binary(sql:variable("@BinaryData"))', 'varchar(max)')

print @CharacterData