Re: Functions to return random numbers in a given range

On Sat, 24 Feb 2024 at 17:10, Tomas Vondra
<tomas(dot)vondra(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi Dean,
>
> I did a quick review and a little bit of testing on the patch today. I
> think it's a good/useful idea, and I think the code is ready to go (the
> code is certainly much cleaner than anything I'd written ...).
>

Thanks for reviewing!

> I do have one minor comments regarding the docs - it refers to "random
> functions" in a couple places, which sounds to me as if it was talking
> about some functions arbitrarily taken from some list, although it
> clearly means "functions generating random numbers". (I realize this
> might be just due to me not being native speaker.)
>

Yes, I think you're right, that wording was a bit clumsy. Attached is
an update that's hopefully a bit better.

> Did you think about adding more functions generating either other types
> of data distributions (now we have uniform and normal), or random data
> for other data types (I often need random strings, for example)?
>
> Of course, I'm not saying this patch needs to do that. But perhaps it
> might affect how we name stuff to make it "extensible".
>

I don't have any plans to add more random functions, but I did think
about it from that perspective. Currently we have "random" and
"random_normal", so the natural extension would be
"random_${distribution}" for other data distributions, with "uniform"
as the default distribution, if omitted.

For different result datatypes, it ought to be mostly possible to
determine the result type from the arguments. There might be some
exceptions, like maybe "random_bytes(length)" to generate a byte
array, but I think that would be OK.

Regards,
Dean