The following module was proposed for inclusion in the Module List:
modid: DBIx::Table::TestDataGenerator
DSLIP: bdpO2
description: Automatic test data creation, cross DBMS
userid: JDS (José Diaz Seng)
chapterid: 7 (Database_Interfaces)
communities:
http://grokbase.com/t/sc/dbix-class/129vmkksqg/candidate-name-dbix-table-testdatagenerator-for-a-cpan-module-readable-version
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.dbi.dev/2012/08/msg7012.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.modules/2012/08/msg81608.html
http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=983419
similar:
DBIx::GenerateData DBIx::CopyRecord
rationale:
There is often the need to create (mass) test data in database
tables, e.g. to test database client performance. If such a target
table has a lot of constraints, it may become tedious to devise a
way to fill it up.
The current module inspects the tables' constraints and adds a
desired number of records. The values of the fields either come from
the table itself (possibly incremented to satisfy uniqueness
constraints) or from tables referenced by foreign key constraints.
The choice of the copied values is random for a number of runs the
user can choose, afterwards the values are chosen randomly from a
cache (reducing database traffic for performance reasons). The user
can define seeds for the randomization to be able to reproduce a
run.
Currently, the module executes the inserts immediately but
following a suggestion I want to give the user the choice to store
the insert commands as text. I will also follow the suggestion to
allow configuring the number of inserts in a transaction in case the
statements are being executed.
Often, one has a self-reference in a table, i.e. an fkey of the
table to itself (e.g. a field "parent_id" referencing a field
"child_id", the latter being the primary key of the table). In this
case, the records naturally form a tree structure and we had the
need to have a balanced structure to get realistic test data. (Think
of a GUI displaying a navigation tree.) The growth of such trees can
be controlled by setting some parameters (maximum depth of new
nodes, minimal number of children, minimal number of roots) and the
nodes are added in a depth-first manner.
A main goal of the module is to reduce configuration to the
absolute minimum. The configuration parameters available are only
there to be able to influence the outcome and the performance.
Another goal is to support as many DBMSs as possible. Currently
Oracle is fully supported (there are still corner cases to handle,
e.g. date fields in uniqueness constraints) and there is a class
called TableProbe which handles some of the database (meta-)data
querying itself and has some methods which cannot be handled
uniformly for all DBMSs and which need to be implemented by objects
of classes derived from TableProbe (currently there is only one,
namely DBIx::Table::TestDataGenerator::TableProbe::Oracle). I will
try to handle all DBMSs having an information schema (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_schema), i.e. MySQL,
Postgresql, SQLite and MSSQL uniformly. The module can be extended
to other DBMSs by writing appropriate TableProbe children.
I have discussed the naming of the module in the threads mentioned
before and received a lot of valuable feedback. The current name of
the module came from Tim Bunce (thanks!) and I think it fits very
well. It surely belongs in DBIx, "Table" makes it clear that the
target is a single table and "Generator" will be fitting when the
inserts can also be stored for later execution (see above) (in fact
the execution if the inserts is a small part which possibly could
have been left out from the module).
I searched for similar modules for a long while and the only ones I
could find were DBIx::GenerateData (this name has been registered,
but there is no code) and DBIx::CopyRecord, which (if I understood
the documentation correctly, please correct me if I am wrong) allows
to copy a single record to be specified by primary key, and
constraints and referenced tables have to be indicated explicitely
by the caller.
enteredby: JDS (José Diaz Seng)
enteredon: Wed Oct 10 23:32:45 2012 GMT
The resulting entry would be:
DBIx::Table::
::TestDataGenerator bdpO2 Automatic test data creation, cross DBMS JDS
Thanks for registering,
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