Chapter 6. Data Volumes

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Chapter 6. Data Volumes

With design, I can think very fast, but my thinking is full of holes.

Alistair Cockburn ^[1]

^[1] Fowler, Martin. Refactoring:Improving the Design of Existing Code . Reading, MA:Addison-Wesley, 1999. Page 67.

As you work through the examples in this book and as you tune your own code for performance, you will occasionally need to create large volumes of test data. People have different techniques for doing this. Some keep test data in external files that they can BCP into the server, some keep test databases or test tables around for the express purpose of coming up with lots of data quickly. Others generate new test data each time they need it.

In this chapter we'll talk about some techniques for generating large volumes of data. There are third-party programs with elaborate facilities for generating test data for SQL Server, but you can generate basic test data of almost any quantity with some very simple queries.

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