Developing, debugging and testing a database application are common tasks for data-intensive organizations. Private companies, medical and financial corporations, and even government authorities are the largest customers for the database developers. Commercial and trade secrets must be protected from a business security standpoint. Privacy policies and government legislations legally restrict the possibilities of organizations to provide real data to database developers, protecting subjects whose information makes the content of a database. Violating such policies and legislations can cause bad publicity and have negative legal consequences altogether.
Why provide real data to the developer at all? The answer is simple: the developers need realistic sample data in order to develop the database, optimize its performance and eliminate possible bugs. Given a sample too small or too far away from whatever data is actually going to be used, the developers make poor decisions, which leads to a non-optimal performance or consistent problems in usability and reliability of a database.
The paradox is obvious: one cant give supply the developers with any real data without...