Re: Output data from database to CSV without revealing structure?

Allen Gibbons wrote:
> I have been asked to extract data from about 100 Oracle database
> tables and output it into comma delimited files. This would be a simple
> task except that the output should NOT reveal any of the structure within
> the database (ie, no normalization, referential integrity, etc.)
>
> Has anyone out there had to do something similar to that described above?
>
> Any ideas would be much appreciated.
>
> AEG
>

Don't know if you're requesting what I think you are. Maybe it's something like one project I worked on in the distant past, where we had to take "live" data and build "demo" data from it (for a user conference). The data dealt with prescriptions and we didn't want to do a SELECT during the conference and put real data up in front of all the users (like who's been buying a particular prescription drug). That hapless person might have been in the audience. But it had to "look" real ... none of the "Jill Doe's husband, John, who lives at 100 Some Street, Anytown, bought 50 Test Brand pills at Test Pharmacy."

We wrote a bunch of scripts to extract the "real" data and scramble it up. We made up family groups of every 100th male and every 129th female, keeping the family surname and number of family members of every 157th family (those numbers aren't real, of course). We made a bunch of cross-reference tables with the original PK and it's new, demo PK (so we could modify all the FKs in other tables). We scrambled credit card numbers and phone numbers.

Of course, no one else could use our scripts (except maybe our pseudo-random method of scrambling credit card numbers while keeping the same first 4 digits that identify the type of card). Someone who knows the data intimately has to make up the "rules".

If you're not trying to get "demo" data, then you can completely ignore this answer ... though it'll go down in history in the Google archives. :) Received on Thu Jan 30 2003 - 12:08:14 CST