> Dear Santa,
>
> I'd like my database to have functionality analogue to how LIMIT works,
> but for other - non-sequential - algorithms.
There was some discussion before to possibly reuse the algorithm ANALYZE
is using for sampling some given percentage of the table data and
provide this for some kind of "SELECT SAMPLE x% " style of
functionality. This would be the fastest you can get for a reasonably
big sample so it can be statistically significant, but not repeatable.
I'm not sure if this is the same what you were asking for though, I
would like something like this for statistical stuff, not for randomly
selecting rows.
Cheers,
Csaba.