ruby on rails - DEPRECATION WARNING: Dangerous query method: Random Record in ActiveRecord >= 5.2

Question

So far, the "common" way to get a random record from the Database has been:

# Postgress
Model.order("RANDOM()").first 

# MySQL
Model.order("RAND()").first

But, when doing this in Rails 5.2, it shows the following Deprecation Warning:

DEPRECATION WARNING: Dangerous query method (method whose arguments are used as raw SQL) called with non-attribute argument(s): "RANDOM()". Non-attribute arguments will be disallowed in Rails 6.0. This method should not be called with user-provided values, such as request parameters or model attributes. Known-safe values can be passed by wrapping them in Arel.sql().

I am not really familiar with Arel, so I am not sure what would be the correct way to fix this.

Answer 1

If you want to continue using order by random() then just declare it safe by wrapping it in Arel.sql like the deprecation warning suggests:

Model.order(Arel.sql('random()')).first # PostgreSQL
Model.order(Arel.sql('rand()')).first   # MySQL

There are lots of ways of selecting a random row and they all have advantages and disadvantages but there are times when you absolutely must use a snippet of SQL in an order by (such as when you need the order to match a Ruby array and have to get a big case when ... end expression down to the database) so using Arel.sql to get around this "attributes only" restriction is a tool we all need to know about.

Edited: The sample code is missing a closing parentheses.