• Not really. Getting just a sub-set of data is quite difficult. There's not really a simple short cut. I'm assuming you want this for test & development. People usually take a few approaches (none of which are without flaws).

    First (and worst), they backup production and use that (look up GDPR to get an idea of why this is a silly choice).

    Next, backup production, restore it somewhere, clean it up, back that up, use it in dev & test. It works, but, you're moving around a lot of data. Company I used to work for did this and had 5 times the storage in dev & test that we had in prod. A tool like Redgate SQL Clone can help with this (yeah, shameless plug for my company). This approach has a bunch of work around creating & maintaining the clean-up scripts.

    Next, do what you're doing, build a method for extracting some of the production data, and hopefully cleaning it along the way. It can be done. It's just lots of work and then you have to maintain it as the structures in production change, oh, and take into account that dev & test structures are also changing, but on a different schedule than production.

    Finally, create test data that's completely fake but you use it to load your test & dev environments. This too is work, but it's not as much work as the extraction method. It's also radically safer than any of the other methods. Here too, Redgate can help with Data Generator (zero shame). The work here is multi-fold, creating the data, creating the scripts and then maintaining it all.

    Best, generate the data, but then you won't be seeing the same distributions as production, testing could miss things, etc. Easiest, backup & clean, but then you might miss important stuff exposing data illegally and you have to deal with space & time. I've mostly used the easy approach. BTW, SQL Clone will shortly have a data masking element that will help to automate this (shame, what's that).

    Hope that helps a little.

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