Daily Archives: November 29, 2011

Just about every developer out there has encountered a scenario where they need to load test the application they are creating, but simply cannot come up with enough load to make it happen. I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole that is load testing an application in this post, but I do want to talk about one component of load testing, which is working with a lot of data. I seem to always run into the situation where I’m developing an application for a client, and when it comes time to test the application in a real world scenario and need real world data, the only viable solution is to back up data from a production server and massage it to “fit” into my applications database. Bad idea. Yes, there are times when this is unavoidable, but in general, do you really want to make multiple copies of sensitive data? Also, in most cases I cannot just copy and paste the data into my database. In the past I’ve created a number of data migration utilities, data population scripts, and used a number of tools just to populate my application with data that I can use to test it. All of this takes time, and effort.  
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