code-diesel

The most common type of web application a developer encounters are database related. But rarely is the case when you have the required data in your database during testing, making it a frequent source of frustration for programmers, who than have to manually populate the database. Having a dummy set of data is always a good thing.

generatedata.com is one such tool. Generatedata lets you specify the database schema details and generates the dummy sql data for you, with table creation and complete inserts. The data can further be exported to html, excel, xml or csv formats. The tool is available online and there is also a downloadable version of the tool if you like to modify the code or need to install it on your server or development machine.

The tool also has an option to generate country specific data; currently limited to Canada,Netherlands,UK and the US. If you need to add other countries to the list, you have the option of modifying the code to suit your specific purpose. Even though there are many free tools available online with the same purpose, I find Generatedata to be simple to use.