GenerateData – Free online test data generator
Posted on November 26, 2008 at 5:43 am
If you write programs that have SQL or MS Access databases on the backend, then there has probably come a point where you needed to generate some test data in order to test out your program.
I’ve actually needed test data when writing Excel macros because unless you use a real set of large test data, you simple won’t be able to anticipate all problems that can possibly arise. If you’re a coder, you know how important it is to test as many inputs as possible.
GenerateData is an online service that you can use to generate random data for populating databases, spreadsheets, etc. You can generate data for all kinds of fields including names, phone numbers, email addresses, cities, states, counties, dates, street addresses, lorem ipsum text, number ranges, alphanumeric strings, auto-increment, and more.
To start generating test data, click on the Generator tab and starting typing in field names and then choosing the field type. On some fields, you will have options you can set and others will not.
You can choose to generate the data in several formats, including HTML, Excel, XML, CSV, or SQL. You can also pick which country you want the data to resemble: US, UK, Netherlands, or Canada.
Type in the number of results you want and then click Generate. You can also click the Rows button if you want to add more columns to your table. Note that the online generator from their website only allows you to generate 200 rows of data.
If you want more, you either have to download the full Data Generator script by click on the Download tab and installing on your web server or you have to donate $20, which will get you a username to login into the site and generate data sets of up to 5,000 rows.
The script is free and pretty easy to install if you know a little SQL and understand how to setup a web server. This is obviously for people who know what they are doing. If you just need a lot of test data and can’t install it yourself, then just donate $20 and you’ll be able to generate larger datasets.
However, unless you need to generate thousands and thousands of rows, 200 should be good enough. If not, you can keep generating 200 rows of data, download the file and then combine them to get to the desired number of rows.
If you do end up donating, you will also have the option of saving your forms, so that you can quickly regenerate datasets without having to re-type everything.
Overall, it’s a great service for anyone who has to generate a lot of test data for programs they may be writing. Enjoy!
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What a joke.
My real tests with pgsql are all with more than one million rows, anything less is for kids.
http://www.GenerateData.com is a cool site. I use it for creating data in my test database.
There is one more online testing site (free) called http://www.TestersDesk.com that is not for database data but for Test Design (their pairwise test generator is simple and powerful).
Also, checkout http://www.TestersDesk.com – It has many free test design tools and test data generation tools, accessed online by registering in the site. For example, you can generate test data files of the specified size, generate data in different languages etc. Besides data, you can even reduce test combinations using the Pairwise TestCase Generator. By the way, it is a free online edition for testing community!