Is Your Test Data Safe? RowGen Randomly Generates or Selects Fields for Realism.

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Solve the Test Data / Prototyping Problem

Use Safe Test Data to Develop and Outsource

Challenges:

Part of the governance role in protecting data at risk is assessing, and avoiding, the use of unsafe production data for prototyping. When realistic test data is needed for:

• application stress and range-testing
• outsourced program development
• simulated database populations
• hardware and software benchmarking
• sharing custom file and report formats

very often those who need test data simply replicate the production database, or use snippets of real production files -- both of which are inherently risky because they can expose sensitive, private data.

Meanwhile, generating useful test data that is safe can be difficult for any number of reasons, including:

• it may be hard to mask real data for test uses
• integrity constraints cannot easily be preserved
• available fake data is in the wrong layout
• the data needs to be filtered and transformed
• complex test data generators are hard to write
• most commercial tools are slow or hard to use

Solutions:

You can now recommend and use a tool that easily generates safe, referentially correct test data in your database table and custom file formats for all of the above uses. Specifically, IRI's test data generation package, RowGen, can generate (and transform) intelligent test data in the same table, report and production file formats you need to load, or send outside the firewall - without using any real, or even masked real, data!

Any number, size, type, and position of fields, records, or files can be specified in a single job script and I/O pass. Various selection and ranging criteria can be applied to synthesize and stress applications.

With RowGen, you can simulate sensitive database and file data, and assure your risk management officials that the data are safe. RowGen's logging and audit functions are also available to help you verify compliance with privacy rules.

Common Metadata
If you also use the SortCL program (in IRI's CoSort package) to define and manipulate production file layouts, you can also use the same metadata to create safe test data in the same formats using RowGen. And when you RowGen, the same metadata you use to define test data can be migrated for use in SortCL to transform real data in the same format(s) when it becomes available.

IRI, The CoSort Company