[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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