Over the years you collect datasets you have created for various types of testing, seeding databases etc. I have always thought one needs to better manage this for future re-use. Recently I wanted to do some “Big Data” playing and again that question of what datasets can I use let me to review the past collated list at Seeking public data for benchmarks.

The types of things I was wanting to do lead me to realize a lot of content is “public domain” and Project Gutenberg is just one great source of text in multiple languages. This was just one aspect of my wish list but text based data is used from blogs, comments, articles, microblogs etc, and multiple languages was important from some text analysis.

With a bit of thinking about the building blocks, I created Good Test Data. A way for me to have core data, IP’s, people’s names, User Agents strings, text for articles, comments and a lot more. And importantly the ability to generate large randomized amounts of this data quickly and easily.

Now I can build a list of 1 million random names with unique usernames and emails with ease. I can generate millions of varying articles, from a short microblog, a comment, a blog to a multi page article. Then be able to produce HTML/PDF/PNG versions giving me file attachments. I’ve been playing more with image generation, creating banner images with varying text, and now I’m generating MP4 video to simulate the various standard sizes for advertising and just to see what people need.

I’m not sure of the potential use and benefit for others and that wasn’t the primary goal, however I would like to know how these building blocks could be used. The data is relatively agnostic, being able to easily load into MySQL tables. Depending on demand, being able to create pre-configured open source product data for e-commence products, CRM or blogging are all possible options.

It is common practice to grant your application the privileges of “GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON yourdb.* TO user@host”.

But what if you want to ensure you cannot DELETE data from just one table?

Ideally I want to be able to “REVOKE DELETE ON yourdb.important_table FROM user@host”. You cannot do currently this with the MySQL privilege system.

If your schema has 100 tables, and you want to remove DELETE from one, you have to define DELETE for the 99 others, and remember that for each new table, you need to remember to also modify user privileges.