We did a performance test of an Oracle database client and needed a way to inflate several existing tables to simulate realistic data sizes in a production environment. The database has a complex structure and lots of primary key, foreign key, uniqueness and check constraints. I came up with an Oracle procedure that analyzes all constraints and automatically adds records to tables until they reach a specified target size. The data in the new records is meaningful (values come e.g. from tables referenced in foreign key relations) and randomly chosen from the corresponding sources and one can also restrict the number of random choices so that the procedure performs reasonably.

The procedure is very useful for us for testing and I wondered if instead of restricting it to Oracle, one could re-implement it as a database agnostic Perl module.

Now there is a huge number of DBIx modules available, so while I could not find something similar to this in CPAN, in particular the DBIx modules, I may have overlooked it. Therefore I have two questions to the community:

(1) Has CPAN already something in that direction?
(2) Do you think it could be useful to have such a (DBIx?) module?

In reply to Idea for DBIx module: Creating mass test databases based on existing ones by jds17

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