I wanted to populate my database with some “real” data (names, addresses, phones, company names etc) instead of random garbage and dozens of test123 records. Looking at ugly or random data is kind of depressing.

So I built some dictionaries containing names, lastnames, companies, streets etc (proving once again that the internet is vast). Then I entertained some thoughts of building a full data generation utility. Finally I created some simple scripts to insert the data and chose another task from my long list. Although I will probably have to come back to this later, it’s cool to have a thousand of the largest corporations in the world in my Accounts ;-)

I wonder if a free/open source data generator exists, containing lists of words (dictionaries) to generate real data.