>I've been tasked with putting together a routine which will grab a certain number of names from our employee tables for our random drug testing.
>
>I know FPW/VFP has the RAND() function but I need to see if someone has a function which, more or less, produces more randomness.
>
>What I'd like to do is:
> a. Use a SQL SELECT to create a cursor with all active employees from a particular paygroup (for us these indicate at which state/site the employee works) - I now know the range of numbers I can pick from - the number of employees in my 'pool'.
> b. Based on the _TALLY of the above SELECT, I can create a random list of 10 record #'s from the cursor.
> c. I can put those records into another cursor and grab the 'lucky' employees' names for our HR director
>
>Any suggestions? (Besides NOT doing random drug testing - I already thought of that one - with no luck!)
>
>Thanks! - Gerry


In one of Jon Bentley´s books (either "PROGRAMMING PEARLS" or "MORE PROGRAMMING PEARLS") there is an article on such selection routines, and a quite good algorithm.