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Ivan Marynych
Ivan Marynych

Posted on • Edited on

The most performed RANDOM querying on Rails!

#random #sql #rails #postgres

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GitHub logo the-rubies-way / random-rails

The most performed gem to get random record you ever seen! Available for Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL right now!

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Image Oct 9, 2025, 04_30_33

RandomRails

🚀 The most performant way to get random records from ActiveRecord. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite with intelligent strategy selection to replace slow ORDER BY RANDOM() queries.

Why RandomRails?

Traditional ORDER BY RANDOM() queries become extremely slow on large tables because they require sorting the entire dataset. RandomRails solves this by using:

  • TABLESAMPLE BERNOULLI for PostgreSQL (ultra-fast on large tables)
  • Efficient offset-based sampling for all databases
  • Intelligent strategy selection based on table size and database type
  • Configurable sampling methods for different use cases

Performance Comparison

Real-world benchmark results comparing RandomRails with traditional methods (10 iterations each):









































Sample Size ORDER BY RANDOM() User.random() User.sample() Performance Gain
1,000 users 3.8359s 0.2157s 347.1409s 17.79x faster
10,000 users 6.1273s 2.7313s 369.7583s 2.24x faster
100,000 users 31.578s 3.6968s 369.4334s 8.54x faster
1,000,000 users 171.497s 5.3441s 373.6102s 32.09x faster

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Key Takeaways:

  • RandomRails consistently outperforms ORDER BY RANDOM() by 2-32x
  • Performance advantage increases dramatically…


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