System and method for rule-driven constraint-based generation of domain-specific data sets

Abstract

A data generation system provides for generating domain-specific, context-sensitive data collections as synthetic data for testing the performance of data processing systems. Within the data generation system, a composition module defines a data generation template containing a plurality of fields each capable of holding one or more values according to specifications defined for predetermined data types. An evaluation module sorts the fields in an order of dependency so that fields whose values affect the values in other of the fields are ordered before the fields whose values are affected by values in other fields. A data generation module populates the fields with values and retrieves a subset of the values populating the plurality of fields for generating each of a plurality of data sets, which are written into memory and made accessible for use in testing data processing systems.