Another neat property of Poisson processes is that when raced against one another, they win in proportion to their underlying rates. This property is the basis of a clever random sampling algorithm that works well in SQL:

    SELECT *
    FROM Population
    WHERE weight > 0
    ORDER BY -LN(1.0 - RANDOM()) / weight
    LIMIT 100  -- Sample size.

For an explanation of how it works, see https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....