Question

How can I generate a random string?
I wrote the following, which gave my only one letter as a result !

declare @alphaCount int
set @alphaCount =  @alphaCount +1
CHAR(@alphaCount)

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

This will give you 10,000 rows in the specified format.

DECLARE @Numbers  TABLE
(
n INT PRIMARY KEY
);


WITH E00(N) AS (SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 1),   --2
        E02(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM E00 a, E00 b), --4
        E04(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM E02 a, E02 b), --16
        E08(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM E04 a, E04 b), --256
        E16(N) AS (SELECT 1 FROM E08 a, E08 b)  --65,536
INSERT INTO @Numbers
SELECT TOP 10000 ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0))
FROM E16        

SELECT CAST((SELECT TOP 20 CHAR(CASE
                                  WHEN Abs(Checksum(Newid()))%2 = 0 THEN 65
                                  ELSE 97
                                END + Abs(Checksum(Newid()))%26)
             FROM   @Numbers n1
             WHERE  n1.n >= -n2.n /*So it gets re-evaluated for each row!*/
             FOR XML PATH('')) AS CHAR(20))
FROM   @Numbers n2