On Tue, Oct 20, 2026 at 11:06 PM David G. Johnston <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tuesday, October 20, 2026, Fujii Masao <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Wed, Oct 21, 2026 at 3:54 AM Matemática A3K <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> > In my terms, this would be something like "Accuracy was traded in >> > order to better convey the idea to the audience". I find this to be >> > valid although I don't share it nor I think the documentation is built >> > upon it, but this is just my opinion, thanks for sharing yours. >> >> pgbench docs already describes random() as producing a "uniformly-distributed >> random integer". So I'm OK with explicitly stating that the distribution is >> uniform here as well. >> >> If we do that, I think it's better to use similar wording to keep the docs >> consistent. > > > I’m not strongly opposed to clarifying this but… > > pgbench also has random_exponential and random_zipfian and calls > random_normal random_gaussian. > Its target audience is quite different than the person executing random in > some SQL command.
While your concern about the audience makes sense, this section is not a tutorial, it's the reference for the implementation. As such, it should be as accurate as possible in order to find its appropriate use. > The fact that normal_uniform doesn’t actually exist because an unqualified > random is conventionally drawn without any bias to a particular value. I think the convention for "random()" is providing numbers sampled from uniform distribution in [0,1] because with this you can generate values from other domains and distributions. That "convention" is not clear where it has been made, so it should be stated. > The clarification in pgbench seems more like pattern matching with its larger > set of random variants. > > I’m less inclined to use pgbench’s phrasing for much the same reason - the > returns wording seems to fit better in chapter 9. I’m also not a fan of > using “uniformly” if we do clarify this. “…from a uniform distribution > covering 0 <= x < 1” would pattern match the existing random_normal wording. I agree that better wording could be used here. How about: - "Returns a value sampled from a uniform distribution in the range 0.0 <= x < 1.0" - "Returns a value sampled from a uniform distribution in the range min <= x <= max" - "Returns a value sampled from a normal distribution with the given parameters;" ?
