Robert Fitzpatrick wrote: > Can anyone suggest how one might be able to do this? I want to be able > to generate an 8 character random password for users in their password > field. Perhaps through the default setting of the field or a trigger > function. I found the following, but is there anything that can be used > on both Windows and *nix or can this be used on Windows somehow? > > http://pgfoundry.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=994 If you don't need something that's actually secure, you ca ndo it trivially in PL/pgsql.Here's what I use, for example: CREATE FUNCTION generate_random_password() RETURNS text AS $$ DECLARE j int4; result text; allowed text; allowed_len int4; BEGIN allowed := '23456789abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKMNPQRSTUVWXYZ&#%@'; allowed_len := length(allowed); result := ''; WHILE length(result) < 16 LOOP j := int4(random() * allowed_len); result := result || substr(allowed, j+1, 1); END LOOP; RETURN result; END; $$ LANGUAGE plpgsql; It's not fast (but how many thousands are you generating per second anyway), it's not "really secure", but it works :) (Note that the function explicitly excludes characters like I, 1 and l because they look too similar) //Magnus
