Website: Fake Name Generator
When I first blogged about this last year, the service was hosted behind an electronics vendor's website, and it only allowed you to generate one fake identity at a time for free (but a batch of 2000 cost only a buck). Since then, the site's creator has made several improvements, including a very generous extension to the free portion of the service. Users may now request a batch of up to 40,000 identities for free and receive the resulting data in about two days (at least until we all start hammering the site for freebies). Since you're allowed to have up to three of those free batch requests queued up, you're actually able to receive up to 120,000 names in fairly short order. Theoretically, you could submit more free requests later on, as long as you have no more than three requests in their queue at the same time. If you absolutely cannot wait the two days for a batch to turn around, you can expedite your request for as little as ten bucks. Considering that each batch of 40,000 names used to cost US$20 under the old pricing, this upgrade is easy to appreciate.
ObDB2: Having 40,000 (or more) rows of decent-looking (but utterly fake) customer data to load into your database can really simplify application testing. The names are realistic, so your test users won't be complaining about screens full of gibberish, and the uniqueness of each record means you can leave your constraints in place. The folks behind this valuable service have truly cracked the problem to the point that you probably have no business attempting to generate your own dummy customer data anymore. In fact, I may send them a little money just for the time they've saved me so far.
Totally sweet photo courtesy of Andrea Harner
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