If you are required to use real production data to test applications, any sensitive data should be "disguised" before loading it into the development environment. Although there are tools to generate convincing test data, it occasionally happens that the variances and frequencies within data cannot easily be simulated. In such cases, the DBA should apply one or more of the obfuscation techniques described in this article, extracted from John Magnabosco's excellent new book, Protecting SQL Server Data.… Read more
