Generating Dummy Data for Testing

I have worked on a number of projects where there hasn’t been enough data to test reports and extracts and other database applications. The database was a third party database and the vendor wouldn’t allow data to be entered via the back end. We didn’t have enough data to test response times or to tune SQL until after GO-Live. This caused a lot of rework after GO-Live which in turn affected the perception of quality of the project as a whole.

The purpose of this article is to provide a means of generating random data which can be inserted into a database for testing purposes.