OK, I found a couple things this weekend that were pretty cool. First, Red-Gate has a new data generator. It's been a long time since a standalone data generator has hit the market. I'm not sure why, but so many think that they can get away with testing their apps without data to back it up. This becomes particularly important in fields like healthcare and insurance where you've got a lot of privacy issues. It's OK, I found a couple things this weekend that were pretty cool. First, Red-Gate has a new data generator. It’s been a long time since a standalone data generator has hit the market. I’m not sure why, but so many think that they can get away with testing their apps without data to back it up. This becomes particularly important in fields like healthcare and insurance where you’ve got a lot of privacy issues. It’s a lot smarter to generate test data than to try to figure out a way to properly obscure the sensitive portions of your data. It’s not only smarter, but it’s also easier. The problem with generated data in the past has been that it didn’t look real enough and a lot of people say that it isn’t valid or that it’s too hard to work with random characters. Well, if you’re talking about working with random characters for names and addresses, etc I’ll give you that. It’s much easier to hold a training class or test scenarios if you’ve got real names, etc in your DB. However, the data’s just as valid as any other data. This is the problem I have with people who don’t like generated data. They say it isn’t valid because it doesn’t represent the business. Well, you can make it represent the business, and the one thing they don’t get is that ALL data is generated. There’s no such thing as data that’s inherently related to healthcare. If there were, you wouldn’t have to model the schema and populate it through the app. In many DBs you’ve got data that’s very unclean as well. And that certainly shouldn’t be representative of your business. So that data gets generated is just fine and it doesn’t invalidate your benchmarks or any other testing you do. I haven’t played with Red-Gate’s new tool at all yet, but I certainly plan to. And when I do, I’ll let you guys know how it goes because it’s an exciting product. That leads me to the second thing I found this weekend. This is what makes Red-Gate’s product so exciting. I found a project up on CodePlex for this new tool. OK, so the tool costs money (though not all that much) and CodePlex is an open source project site. But it’s not the code for the tool that’s on CodePlex, it’s the data generators. You can get data generators for different industries, or different types of data. Personally, that’s just exciting because your data’s only as good as your generator’s dictionary and with everyone adding industry-specific data it only increases your chance for success. And even if you’re not looking for industry-specific data, just having access to that many more names, addresses, phone numbers, zips, shipping codes, etc is priceless. This is what open source was meant to be. Everyone wins in this situation. Now, I really don’t admonish Red-Gate for charging for the tool because they’re a software vendor. What do you expect them to do? But I can’t think of any other data generating product that has open source dictionaries posted anywhere. It follows the green computing movement. Sure, they charge for the product, but they’re already wrapping a community around it. Nice job guys.Now, like I said, I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m really hoping it’ll be the same quality as the rest of Red-Gate’s tools. And as for data generators… the only other standalone generator I can think of is Data Generator by Quest and they’ve taken that away from us and kinda rolled portions of it up into Benchmark Factory. But Quest doesn’t have an actual data generator anymore. I guess they figured it wasn’t important enough. The only real reason to stop development on it would be because they weren’t selling enough. And from the talks I’ve had with people at Quest about other things, they typically interpret this to mean that the industry just doesn’t want that particular tool. Sometimes that’s right, but I’m thinking quite often it’s not. It isn’t that the industry doesn’t see the value, it’s usually that Quest values it too highly and nobody want’s to spend several thousand dollars for a simple tool they use for development. I think that if Quest had dropped the price (drastically) of Data Generator, they would have seen an increase in sales because then it wouldn’t be so costly for dev shops to generate test data. This is a concept that Red-Gate has always gotten as a matter of business. They don’t over-charge for any of their products. They’ve always understood that simple tools should have simple price tags and they’ve done very well with that philosophy. While others like Quest tend to try to get their millions in just a few sales. Just for fun though, here’s a list of some other data generators out there. GenerateData — www.GenerateData.com — Open source and these guys have a sense of humor. They advertise not only being able to generate your data, but also to help you ‘score with girls’ and it apparently ‘does your laundry’ too. I like these guys just for not taking themselves too seriously.TurboData — www.TurboData.ca — from $200 – $550.DTM Data Generator — https://www.sqledit.com/dg — $160-$240 GS Data Generator — http://www.gsapps.com/products/datagenerator — $600-$1,950Advanced Data Generator — https://www.upscene.com/ — $190-$230DataTect and ER/DataGen — https://www.datatect.com/ — $600-$1,750 DataGen — https://www.e-naxos.com/datagen.aspx — $400-$8,000DB Data Generator — https://www.datanamic.com/datagenerator/index.html — $250-$275Anyway, so there are some other choices. And the next logical step would be for me to go through each one of them and build a matrix of functionality. Yeah, if only time permitted that. I’ll try to hit one every now and then though and report back on them as possible. It does make me wonder though why Quest chose to get out of that market. There seems to be lots of play. And the importance I think is going to be speed and diversity, right? I’ve used generators before that took way too long to push data across and you just can’t have that. I’m not going to mention which one it is, but it was a big one. OK, I think I’ve exhausted this subject. Except to say that a quick search yielded no results for online communities like Red-Gate has started. And there’s real power in that. Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at: https://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com Read my book reviews at: www.ITBookworm.com Blog Author of: DBA Rant – https://dbarant.blogspot.com Databases