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

Sometimes we need a lot of random things: love, kindness, vacation, etc. I have collected a few random generators over the years, and these are from Pinal Dave and a stackoverflow answer I found once. Refs below.

--Adapted from Pinal Dave; http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/04/29/sql-server-random-number-generator-script-sql-query/
SELECT 
    ABS( CAST( NEWID() AS BINARY( 6)) %1000) + 1 AS RandomInt
    , CAST( (ABS( CAST( NEWID() AS BINARY( 6)) %1000) + 1)/7.0123 AS NUMERIC( 15,4)) AS RandomNumeric
    , DATEADD( DAY, -1*(ABS( CAST( NEWID() AS BINARY( 6)) %1000) + 1), GETDATE()) AS RandomDate
    --This line from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15038311/sql-password-generator-8-characters-upper-and-lower-and-include-a-number
    , CAST((ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))%10) AS VARCHAR(1)) + CHAR(ASCII('a')+(ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))%25)) + CHAR(ASCII('A')+(ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))%25)) + LEFT(NEWID(),5) AS RandomChar
    , ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID()))%50000+1 AS RandomID