Today I needed to generate random SQL Server data for some tests. At first, the most accesible solution that I found was this: http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/technology/archives/how-to-easily-populate-a-table-with-random-data-7888, unfortunately it was for DB2 and porting it to SQL Server did not seem like an easy task.
The second solution was this: http://www.sqlmanager.net/products/mssql/datagenerator. I knew that EMS offers a trial for their products, so I downloaded and installed. Similar to the experience I previously had with EMS SQL Manager (hhttp://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/mssql/manager), the data generator was very intuitive and easy to work with. I only used it to generate data for one table which had 2 foreign keys, but I am sure it can handle more complex scenarios without any problems. The trial version only lets you generate 100 rows at a time, but after a few iterations it was easy to generate up to 300.000 rows by duplicating what was already there.
The EMS database tools seem to do a really good job.
Print | posted on Saturday, June 21, 2008 10:51 PM