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

There are a lot of good answers but so far none of them allow a customizable character pool and work as a default value for a column. I wanted to be able to do something like this:

alter table MY_TABLE add MY_COLUMN char(20) not null
  default dbo.GenerateToken(crypt_gen_random(20))

So I came up with this. Beware of the hard-coded number 32 if you modify it.

-- Converts a varbinary of length N into a varchar of length N.
-- Recommend passing in the result of CRYPT_GEN_RANDOM(N).
create function GenerateToken(@randomBytes varbinary(max))
returns varchar(max) as begin

-- Limit to 32 chars to get an even distribution (because 32 divides 256) with easy math.
declare @allowedChars char(32);
set @allowedChars = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz012345';

declare @oneByte tinyint;
declare @oneChar char(1);
declare @index int;
declare @token varchar(max);

set @index = 0;
set @token = '';

while @index < datalength(@randomBytes)
begin
    -- Get next byte, use it to index into @allowedChars, and append to @token.
    -- Note: substring is 1-based.
    set @index = @index + 1;
    select @oneByte = convert(tinyint, substring(@randomBytes, @index, 1));
    select @oneChar = substring(@allowedChars, 1 + (@oneByte % 32), 1); -- 32 is the number of @allowedChars
    select @token = @token + @oneChar;
end

return @token;

end