[Minor] Improvement on random functions doc

On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, Fujii Masao <masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 3:54 AM Matemática A3K <matematica(dot)a3k(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> > In my terms, this would be something like "Accuracy was traded in
> > order to better convey the idea to the audience". I find this to be
> > valid although I don't share it nor I think the documentation is built
> > upon it, but this is just my opinion, thanks for sharing yours.
>
> pgbench docs already describes random() as producing a
> "uniformly-distributed
> random integer". So I'm OK with explicitly stating that the distribution is
> uniform here as well.
>
> If we do that, I think it's better to use similar wording to keep the docs
> consistent.
>

I’m not strongly opposed to clarifying this but…

pgbench also has random_exponential and random_zipfian and calls
random_normal random_gaussian. Its target audience is quite different than
the person executing random in some SQL command. The fact that
normal_uniform doesn’t actually exist because an unqualified random is
conventionally drawn without any bias to a particular value.

The clarification in pgbench seems more like pattern matching with its
larger set of random variants.

I’m less inclined to use pgbench’s phrasing for much the same reason - the
returns wording seems to fit better in chapter 9. I’m also not a fan of
using “uniformly” if we do clarify this. “…from a uniform distribution
covering 0 <= x < 1” would pattern match the existing random_normal wording.

David J.