Quick Links
Challenges
You need realistic test data files and test report generation to:
- develop and stress JCL and COBOL programs on the mainframe
- build and simulate new BI and analytic applications
- evaluate CRM, ERP, EAI, EII, and other systems
- prototype ETL operations and bulk load scenarios
- benchmark new hardware or software platforms
The data you have in production files or reports may be inaccessible, restricted by company policy or data privacy laws, or may not even exist. And if you do have access to test data files or test reports, they may not contain the range or volume of data that may be involved in the future.
Solutions
IRI RowGen software can synthesize and customize test data generation directly in many structured file formats, as well as in detail and summary report targets:
- Record, line, or variable sequential
- CSV and other delimited files, JSON, and XML (click for task examples)
- Excel (XLS and XLSX, in row or column format) - see examples # 1&2 here
- LDIF
- Structured (flat/fixed-length) text files
- COBOL index (MF-ISAM, Vision)
- Mainframe blocked
- Detail/summary reports with custom formatting
RowGen randomly creates field values in more than 100 data types. It can also randomly select (or mask) data from real datasets, so the test data values can contain either artificial and real (but scrambled or otherwise de-identified) data. RowGen also applies intelligent selection and ranging criteria, as well as desiredf data frequency distributions, to improve data realism.
Targets in these formats can persist in standalone files written to on-premisefolders or cloud buckets in Amazon S3, Azure Blob and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) storage. But they can also stream through pipes, procedures, or message queues to
Embedded support for standard and complex data transformations, set file (value) lookups, conditional filters, and custom formatting helps RowGen simulate production file and report formats for a variety of applications. And once these files are built, or streaming test data sets are built, your test file management (test data provisioning) possibilities include both static, automated, and virtual test data targets, as well as test data management hubs and CI/CD platforms like Jenkins, Amazon Code Pipeline, Azure DevOps and GitLab.
