SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry and the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for USA-based Innovative Routines, a leading developer of big data transformation and data-centric protection software, today announced the latter's upgrading of its RowGen package to automatically populate intelligent, referentially correct databases with safe, intelligent test data.
RowGen version 3 will run from the IRI Workbench GUI built on Eclipse, on the command line, or from batch programs, to produce the quality and quantity of test data necessary to accurately reflect the layouts and relationships of production databases, data warehouses and operational data stores. RowGen Control Language (.rcl) files specify the generation, manipulation and formatting of test data for realistic database table, flat-file and custom report targets.
For test database creation, RowGen v3 will feature a wizard in the IRI Workbench that automates the following steps:
* Parse - by selecting the schema and tables to populate, RowGen translates the database table descriptions and integrity constraints into .rcl scripts that specify the source structure, dependent sets and data creation in the order necessary to populate the tables in the right format, and with all primary and foreign key relationships intact, regardless of complexity.
* Generate - by building and running the .rcl scripts to create one test file per table that can be bulk loaded and/or saved for future use.
* Populate - by bulk loading the target tables in the right order with pre-sorted test data that is structurally and referentially correct.
The result of this process is a test database that is safe for outsourcing, compliant with data privacy laws and business rules, and robust enough to stress-test applications because the tables contain the necessary ranges (and distribution) of values and numbers of rows.
To enhance test data realism, RowGen randomly generates data in specified column data type formats; randomly selects from real data values in set files extracted from production sources; and supports the full range of data transformation and formatting capabilities in the CoSort SortCL program. According to IRI technical director Rob Howard: "These features ensure that only the most realistic data values are created while referential integrity is also maintained."
For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at tel (+27) 11 234 1560; fax (+27) 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za.
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