I find this issue to be very challenging and time consuming when trying to complete my development work. I'm sure we would all love to be able to have test data and/or data obfuscated to protect from any possibility of data breaches. Unfortunately, some of the problems which arise with the data almost require you to have the actual data causing the problem in order to troubleshoot and resolve the problem which has occurred. I personally wish it wasn't so.

I remember when I first learned how to program. During our coursework, we were required before producing any code to create our expected output (test data). In our test data, it was necessary for us to create valid and invalid records to test the validity of our logic within the applications. Unfortunately, the majority of the development positions I have worked have not made this step a an integral part of the development process.

Incidentally, the company I currently work for does have several test accounts which are created by the quality assurance team. In fact, working in the financial industry, the company has funded some of the test accounts with money to further provide the ability to test. I found this to be an interesting and welcome change from other jobs I have worked. Though, there never seems to be enough of this accounts available to perform your tests because many development efforts are using them and changing them could hamper their efforts. But, I guess having them is better then not having them.

On a final note, we have recently purchased Visual Studio Team System Database Edition from Microsoft for our Database Development team. Though, we are still working our way through all the different functionality the software provides, an interesting part of the software related to this discussion are the data generation plans. I have only played around with them through one of the "walkthroughs" but it provides the ability to create, as the name implies, data and save the plan for future use. The data generation plans can be modified and appear to provide the ability to create PK/FK relationships. You also can create your plan to grab the real data, for example a state table, or you can have it generate the data itself. I have not had a chance to experiment any further than the initial walkthrough so I still have to evaluate the pros and cons of using this in our development environment. But, it may prove to be what we need to make our development easier.

Thanks for the great topic Steve.