Have you ever needed to generate a random number within your Oracle PL/SQL code? I recently had a need to just this. My requirement was to generate a random 6 digit pin number for users to login to our web systems with.
I found that the dbms_random package does exactly what I need, and is extremely simple to use.
My first test of this was just to run the statement:
select dbms_random.value from dual
This will return a random number, greater than or equal to 0 and less than 1, with decimal 38 digits. When I ran this command my result was:
0.622324263489056
The DBMS_RANDOM.VALUE function can also take 2 arguments, the low number and the high number. By using these two arguments you can get a random Oracle number x, where x is greater than or equal to the low number and less than the high number.
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