Best way to select random rows PostgreSQL

Question

I want a random selection of rows in PostgreSQL, I tried this:

select * from table where random() < 0.01;

But some other recommend this:

Answer 1

Add a column called r with type serial. Index r.

Assume we have 200,000 rows, we are going to generate a random number n, where 0 < n <= 200, 000.

Select rows with r > n, sort them ASC and select the smallest one.

Code:

select * from YOUR_TABLE 
where r > (
    select (
        select reltuples::bigint AS estimate
        from   pg_class
        where  oid = 'public.YOUR_TABLE'::regclass) * random()
    )
order by r asc limit(1);

The code is self-explanatory. The subquery in the middle is used to quickly estimate the table row counts from https://stackoverflow.com/a/7945274/1271094 .

In application level you need to execute the statement again if n > the number of rows or need to select multiple rows.