JumpStart 1.6

Populating a development database with identical records presents problems with testing your database applications. By using a database data initialization tool, you as a developer can populate your database with sample data easily and quickly. This data will more closely represent what your real data will look like. The advantages to this are that you can setup various scenarios and do performance testing. Another big advantage is you can generate test data for demonstration purposes. During the process of your testing, developers tend to put unrealistic looking data into the system because development is usually considered more important than typing in test data. When the application is ready to demo, someone needs to replace all the "test" data with something that looks realistic. With this type of setup, you can now start your application and measure performance against data that is easy to distinguish and provides some variety so that indexes can be tested accurately as well. When you demo the software, the names and other data look realistic.