Where do I find good example data?

Question

Where do people find sample data that they need for development but can't get directly from their employer for whatever reason?

I am looking to rewrite my employers' delivery track and trace software as an exercise.

Answer 1

Have you considered generating a set of sample data?

There are a lot of good tools for generating sample data using reverse regular expressions and combining common lists of stuff like names, localities, coordinates, etcetera.

Answer 2

were you looking for sample data sets like this? Info chimps has a good set of sample data.

Answer 3

Have you considered the AdventureWorks database?

http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/

Answer 4

With respect to sample data, how sensitive is your company's production data? Can you extract, anonymize, and use that? I've found large datasets full of real-life-proven data very helpful in the past.

Answer 5

That's a pretty broad question. For data sets anyhow, you might try checking out Data.gov, for a wide variety of government created data sets.

Answer 6

Have you considered RedGate's Data Generator?

http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-data-generator/