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

For one random letter, you can use:

select substring('ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ',
                 (abs(checksum(newid())) % 26)+1, 1)

An important difference between using newid() versus rand() is that if you return multiple rows, newid() is calculated separately for each row, while rand() is calculated once for the whole query.