I needed to create some test data for a sample database I'm building for my book.

My first thought was "Red Gate must have something" but I looked in my installed Red Gate SQL apps and there wasn't anything of the sort. It turns out that they do, indeed, have a product in beta - SQL Data Generator. (Thanks to Michael Campbell for the hint.)

I've been playing with the beta for the past few days and as usual, Red Gate has nailed it.

Not only does it have lots of lists available (countries, first names, last names, etc), it's very easy to add your own. You can populate directly from the lists or through functions. Constraints and foreign keys are honored as well for the most part. There are a lot of settings you can use to tweak how the data is populated.

And there is more in the works for when version 1 gets released.

If you have a need to create test data, I'd definitely check it out.

In case this sounds like an advertisement, it's not. I just have really enjoyed working with the tool and wanted to share. :-)