User.find(:all, :order => "RANDOM()", :limit => 10) was the way I did it in Rails 3.
User.all(:order => "RANDOM()", :limit => 10) is how I thought Rails 4 would do it, but this is still giving me a Deprecation warning:
DEPRECATION WARNING: Relation#all is deprecated. If you want to eager-load a relation, you can call #load (e.g. `Post.where(published: true).load`). If you want to get an array of records from a relation, you can call #to_a (e.g. `Post.where(published: true).to_a`).
You'll want to use the order and limit methods instead. You can get rid of the all.
For PostgreSQL and SQLite:
User.order("RANDOM()").limit(10)
Or for MySQL:
User.order("RAND()").limit(10)
As the random function could change for different databases, I would recommend to use the following code:
User.offset(rand(User.count)).first
Of course, this is useful only if you're looking for only one record.
If you wanna get more that one, you could do something like:
User.offset(rand(User.count) - 10).limit(10)
The - 10 is to assure you get 10 records in case rand returns a number greater than count - 10.
Keep in mind you'll always get 10 consecutive records.
I think the best solution is really ordering randomly in database.
But if you need to avoid specific random function from database, you can use pluck and shuffle approach.
For one record:
User.find(User.pluck(:id).shuffle.first)
For more than one record:
User.where(id: User.pluck(:id).sample(10))
I would suggest making this a scope as you can then chain it:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base
scope :random, -> { order(Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('RANDOM', [])) }
end
User.random.limit(10)
User.active.random.limit(10)
While not the fastest solution, I like the brevity of:
User.ids.sample(10)
The .ids method yields an array of User IDs and .sample(10) picks 10 random values from this array.
Strongly Recommend this gem for random records, which is specially designed for table with lots of data rows:
https://github.com/haopingfan/quick_random_records
All other answers perform badly with large database, except this gem:
4.6ms totally.
User.order('RAND()').limit(10) cost 733.0ms.
offset approach cost 245.4ms totally.
User.all.sample(10) approach cost 573.4ms.
Note: My table only has 120,000 users. The more records you have, the more enormous the difference of performance will be.
UPDATE:
Perform on table with 550,000 rows
Model.where(id: Model.pluck(:id).sample(10)) cost 1384.0ms
gem: quick_random_records only cost 6.4ms totally
You could call .sample on the records, like: User.all.sample(10)
The answer of @maurimiranda User.offset(rand(User.count)).first is not good in case we need get 10 random records because User.offset(rand(User.count) - 10).limit(10) will return a sequence of 10 records from the random position, they are not "total randomly", right? So we need to call that function 10 times to get 10 "total randomly".
Beside that, offset is also not good if the random function return a high value. If your query looks like offset: 10000 and limit: 20 , it is generating 10,020 rows and throwing away the first 10,000 of them, which is very expensive. So call 10 times offset.limit is not efficient.
So i thought that in case we just want to get one random user then User.offset(rand(User.count)).first maybe better (at least we can improve by caching User.count).
But if we want 10 random users or more then User.order("RAND()").limit(10) should be better.
Here's a quick solution.. currently using it with over 1.5 million records and getting decent performance. The best solution would be to cache one or more random record sets, and then refresh them with a background worker at a desired interval.
Created random_records_helper.rb file:
module RandomRecordsHelper
def random_user_ids(n)
user_ids = []
user_count = User.count
n.times{user_ids << rand(1..user_count)}
return user_ids
end
in the controller:
@users = User.where(id: random_user_ids(10))
This is much quicker than the .order("RANDOM()").limit(10) method - I went from a 13 sec load time down to 500ms.
