How can I generate a random bytea

I would like to be able to generate random bytea fields of arbitrary length (<1Gb) for populating test data.

What is the best way of doing this?

Enhancing Jack Douglas's answer to avoid the need for PL/PgSQL looping and bytea concatenation, you can use:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION random_bytea(bytea_length integer)
RETURNS bytea AS $body$
    SELECT decode(string_agg(lpad(to_hex(width_bucket(random(), 0, 1, 256)-1),2,'0') ,''), 'hex')
    FROM generate_series(1, $1);
$body$
LANGUAGE 'sql'
VOLATILE
SET search_path = 'pg_catalog';

It's a simple SQL function that's cheaper to call than PL/PgSQL.

The difference in performance due to the changed aggregation method is immense for larger bytea values. Though the original function is actually up to 3x faster for sizes < 50 bytes, this one scales much better for larger values.

Or use a C extension function:

I've implemented a random bytea generator as a simple C extension function. It's in my scrapcode repository on GitHub. See the README there.

It nukes the performance of the above SQL version:

regress=# \a
regress=# \o /dev/null
regress=# \timing on
regress=# select random_bytea(2000000);
Time: 895.972 ms
regress=# drop function random_bytea(integer);
regress=# create extension random_bytea;
regress=# select random_bytea(2000000);
Time: 24.126 ms

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#22512, answer score: 26