You most definitely should be able to do that, and the SQL standard provides for this (sort of, kind of): TABLESAMPLE. This applies specifically to exactly one

You most definitely should be able to do that, and the SQL standard provides for this (sort of, kind of): TABLESAMPLE. This applies specifically to exactly one table so the issue of dubious predicate pushdown never arises. That said, I understand the SQL standard samples at the page level so you get a database-page-worth of results (8k in MSSQL) rather than a properly scattered sample. AIUI the standard allows for any other kind of sampling, but MSSQL doesn't support that (yet) but I believe postgres does. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49061229/in-postgresql-how-do-i-random-sample-from-table-based-on-the-proportion-of-each https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49061229/in-postgresql-h...