Test User Data (Fake Data) [closed]

Question

Where can I get, or how can I generate a large formatted collection of fake user data (names, email address, locations, etc.) that can be used for testing an application?

It can be clearly fake, this will be limited to the development server. But I'm sure anything would be better than what I could come up with.

Answer 1

Check out this list of "Funny Names" some of them are classic

http://www.ethanwiner.com/funnames.html

Answer 2

There are some tools built just for this. I've used http://www.generatedata.com/ before to generate data for MySql databases. RedGate has a nice tool to fill your SQL Server database with test data called SQL Data Generator. The RedGate tool costs about $300, but there is a free trial.

UPDATE: Faker.js is now available. It is a project built on node.js, and looks pretty comprehensive.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mockaroo is great!

If you'd like an HTTP API of fake user data, check out Random User Generator

Answer 3

http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ is a good resource for creating test data with realistic looking users complete with SSN, email address, ... They have a bulk download option too.

Answer 4

Another open source test generator tool is my own http://code.google.com/p/csvtest.

Answer 5

This is a open source tool for generating various types of test data. http://www.generatedata.com

Answer 6

For anyone looking for an updated solution to this problem... I wrote a test data generator project for Data Synchronisation Studio. It can generate a large dataset ranging from 1 to 100s of millions of rows of realistic testing data (lots of OFs there :D) Anyway, here is a blog post all about it. http://www.simego.com/Blog/2012/02/Test-Data-Generator-Download-for-Data-Sync