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Anonymize your dev databases!

I’ve been working on a little gadget for a while now, and today I finally got around to completing it and so now I’ve published it for everyone to try out. It’s a web API (wait, wait, don’t go away – it’s for database people!) that creates a randomized list of names, addresses, etc.

In this post, I’ll show you how easy it is to use this service to anonymize a development or test database so you don’t have all that personally identifiable information floating around.

Fun with random names

Just for laughs, we’re going to take a look at a slightly-too-complex yet elegant solution to a seemingly simple task: creating a list of 100 fictional company names for a demo database.

Identifiers in T-SQL

From time to time, you’re going to be confronted with a SQL Server solution where you need manage column or table names that contain non-alphanumeric characters, like for instance space or percent, or even reserved keywords like “table” or “select”.