Oracle rand() function

Question

I tried to select a random data from table employees with query rand() but it can happen

SELECT email FROM employees
ORDER BY RAND()
LIMIT 1;

and the output is:

ORA-00933: SQL command not properly ended
00933. 00000 - "SQL command not properly ended"

Can somebody tell me why??

Answer 1

The Oracle equivalent of rand() is dbms_random.value.

The Oracle equivalent of limit is either a subquery with rownum or (in Oracle 12) fetch first xx row only. So, one of these should work:

select email
from employees
order by dbms_random.value
fetch first 1 row only;

or:

select email
from (select email
      from employees
      order by dbms_random.value
     ) e
where rownum = 1