Test Data Generation with Data Dude

SQL Server Universe.com: "Test Data Generation with Data Dude by Dinesh Priyankara"

The Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (a.k.a. Data Dude) was released somewhere around December 2006 helping many Database Administrators and Database Developers. The release was huge for us, because it addresses many issues faced by us. The team system concept was introduced by Microsoft, understanding that the software developer is not the only key person in the development life cycle and consolidating the entire team into one box, giving different tool sets for each role players. For example, while the developer uses the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers, architect uses the Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects. At the beginning, there was no proper place for the DBA (and DBE) to sit with the team and work; he plays his role in an isolated environment with great difficulties. Some of the problems faced by both Database Administrators and Database Developers (or Engineers) were versioning the changes, making changes directly to production environment, inability to find the errors early before running changes in production environment and doing the unit tests. There were various tools for addressing these issues by supporting the DBA and DBE but there was no tool that addressed everything. Finally Microsoft decided to make him part of the team by providing a tool that contains everything DBA and DBE wanted, introduced Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. This tool gives us many things, mainly giving us an environment where the “truth” of the schema resides, allowing us to manage and test the changes without harming the production environment. It supports build changes and deployment. There are some articles / blog posts describing the tool where you can get a clear picture of the tool. This article mainly focuses on one of the key features, Test Data Generator which is very important when the development life cycle comes into unit testing.