I'm working on a python script to grab every field in an mssql database and various metadata about each, then generating a series of data dictionaries in XLSX format.  
I've almost finished, but I'm now trying to grab 10 unique values from each field as an example of the data each field contains (for dates I'm using max & min).  Currently I'm using select distinct top 10 X from table; for each field, but with a largish database, this is incredibly slow going.  
Is there a quicker/better alternative?
It would seem that by select distinct top 10 * from table; and then parsing that data with Python I save an incredible amount of time.  I may not end up with 10 values per field, but it's good enough!
Efficiently get a list of x unique values for every field in a database