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

I did this in SQL 2000 by creating a table that had characters I wanted to use, creating a view that selects characters from that table ordering by newid(), and then selecting the top 1 character from that view.

CREATE VIEW dbo.vwCodeCharRandom
AS
SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT 
    CodeChar
FROM dbo.tblCharacter
ORDER BY 
    NEWID()

...

SELECT TOP 1 CodeChar FROM dbo.vwCodeCharRandom

Then you can simply pull characters from the view and concatenate them as needed.

EDIT: Inspired by Stephan's response...

select top 1 RandomChar from tblRandomCharacters order by newid()

No need for a view (in fact I'm not sure why I did that - the code's from several years back). You can still specify the characters you want to use in the table.