Guru's Guide to SQL Server™ Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML, The

Approaches to Generating Data

The two most important ingredients in making test data are the uniqueness/randomness of the data and the time it takes to produce. Random data is usually better, and shorter creation times are better. What we want to do is produce data that is as random or unique as possible in as short a time as possible. These two variables are usually inversely proportional to one another. That is, you increase one at the expense of the other. Increasing data randomness also increases the time it takes to produce. Similarly, improving the time it takes to generate test data usually lessens its uniqueness.

Although the examples we'll cover typically only generate 100 rows of data, you can extend them to generate practically any ...