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Generate a temp table with a sufficient number of random values and join. Add an ORDER BY RANDOM() to those results to subsample.

Another approach would be to create a table with a small sample of the main one and refresh it periodically -- each query just needs to do a random reordering on the small sample, and the results will be truly random over time.

I think this is a good approach and I see a few ways to make it even better. First you could overfetch to reduce risk of needing another query. Secondly you could rewrite ids occasionally to reduce gaps.

> try again

This where you can spend a surprising amount of time unpredictably.

Having a pre-shuffled array helps much more.

Depends on how big a percentage of the set you're planning to pick but yeah that would work.