[thelist] Dummy database data

Chris Nicholls evolt at axe.dircon.co.uk
Fri Jan 14 11:06:01 CST 2005


Many of us no doubt have used "lorem ipsum" text to fill out designs 
with dummy content.

I need the database equivalent - dummy data to populate tables with 
contact information, as well as titles for books/songs.

We could make up and then type the data in ourselves, but we need a lot 
of records (ideally 3000 or so) to showcase our new product effectively, 
and I doubt we would manage it.

Has anyone ever come across such a resource, or have any ideas as  to 
how we might produce some quickly?

Maybe a demo of a product that comes with a dummy DB?

One idea I was turning over, for contact names, was to create a table 
of, say, 300 individual name words (easier than 3000), and then writing 
a script to generate random combinations to create unique first 
name/surname combinations.

This would probably work less well for song titles/book names, and 
unless the seed data was sufficiently large and varied I think the 
repetitiveness of the source data would be obvious.

i.e. if I were to create, say 500 random book titles from 100 random 
words, certain words would turn up time and time again. As our product 
incorporates a text search facility which we hope to demo, I think 
having too much data with a common ancestry would look a bit rubbish.

Any ideas?

Cheers

-Chris



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