Re: New function normal_rand_array function to contrib/tablefunc.

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024 at 15:23, Aleksander Alekseev
<aleksander@timescale.com> wrote:
>
> > > =# SELECT array_random(1, 10, random(0, 3)) FROM generate_series( ... )
> > > {5}
> > > {1, 3, 8}
> > > {7, 6}
> > > ...
> >
> > Yeah, that looks like a neater API.
> >
> > Something that bothers me somewhat is that it's completely trivial for
> > the user to write such a function for themselves, so is it really
> > useful enough to include in core?
>
> I think it would be useful. Many users don't bother writing C
> extensions for tasks like this. So at least our implementation is
> going to be faster.
>

If we are going to add such a function to core, then I think we should
make it consistent and at least as flexible as the other array
functions, and support multi-dimensional arrays with optional
non-default lower-bounds, like array_fill(). I.e., something like:

  random_array(min int, max int, dims int[] [, lbounds int[]]) -> int[]

  Returns an array filled with random values in the range min <= x <= max,
  having dimensions of the lengths specified by dims. The optional lbounds
  argument supplies lower-bound values for each dimension (which default
  to all 1).

Regards,
Dean