How to create test data using MS Sql Server

What is test data creation in testing Business Intelligence application ?
What is the relevance of test data creation ?
How is test effectiveness measured in terms of the amount of test data we create to do BI testing ?

There are many other questions which can be religiously and profusely asked by the test enthusiasts, but most of us may not be in a position to answer all of them without touch basing the basic point that no testing can be performed in a BI based application without a proper test data generator being in place. When I say proper , it means a lot specially with so many tools available we still need the ability to code and get this test data preparation done as per our needs.

Manual creation of test data may not be a good way of performing the testing activities in the BI domain. The simple reason accompanying the ideology to this conjecture is application performance .
Performance of an application gets deteriorated when we have huge chunk of data in place and a simple job is run to load data from one source to another one as per the business model's needs.
For example we might need to load some SAP systems data into a simple flat file type data. There can be numerous such occasions when we need to load data from some typical Line of business applications into some separate systems, in this case just a flat file.

So going to the main point how do we create test data ?
Suppose we have  a need to create a thousand record within a excel sheet, we may utilise the excel tips like dragging , or Control + D etc, but to what extent ?

It has always been a known fact that coding is the only way an engineering excellence can be achieved especially in the software world, there is absolutely no other choice if you are really interested to bring the best quality product in place.

Very recently I had come across a small challenge in one of my activities. I had to create a couple of million test data in a specific format to suit the testing of the application under test. Let us have a sample case to make things easy for us to understand.
            I have a simple job which when run, transforms various record sets from some flat file into a table. So basically the source file is my test data in current context, and when I run the job , the records from source file will be loaded onto the table within a particular database. By the way I have been using a term here 'job'.
Has it got anything to do with the daily office going job ? Jokes apart, I know people from Business Intelligence domain are pretty accustomed with the term job but for others I would just like to add some details. So job is basically a sequence of coded steps which can be configured using MS Sql Server/ or many other tools . This combination of steps results in a set of activities as needed by the development architecture.In general for ETL activities is what I shall be discussing this article on.
So just to give some insight on the business requirement front, I have MS Sql server on my machine, on which the job has been configured, I have a source file that will have some record sets in it and the same is placed on some folder within the same machine. And now what I will do is just run the job . After some time job completes with a success message displayed implying that job has been successfully able to extract data from the source file and load the valid data in the table within the database.
That is as simple as moving out from one home into another one, just to make office commuting easy in day to day life.. I hope I did not break your rhythm.

By the way I was just looking at the title of this blog post, "How to create test data using MS Sql Server". And was just thinking if my post till now did any justice to this topic. Yeah of course creating a base on which now we can understand the relevance of test data creation and importance of coding skills in creating huge chunks of data in a matter of seconds.

But will continue some time later , for now feeling sleepy !!!






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