USE AdventureWorks ; GO SELECT FirstName, LastName FROM Person.Contact TABLESAMPLE (10 rows) ;TABLESAMPLE is particularly nice for grabbing a %.....and I'm guessing is faster than using NEWID...however, there are a few gotchas...
USE AdventureWorks ; GO SELECT top 10 FirstName, LastName FROM Person.Contact TABLESAMPLE (500 rows) ;If NEWID works fine for you on large tables, I'd go with NEWID....but if you run into performance or other issues, this might be worth a try