I had a great question today about whether there's an easy way to simulate event streams for doing a proof of concept or for testing. Yes, in fact, there are several ways to do this:
- Use the ESP random tuples generator
- Build a datafile in either csv or xml format supported by either the file input adapter for playback tool and then it will read the data from the file and stream it into ESP. The advantage of using the playback tool is that it can play it at a controlled rate, whereas the file input adapter will just read it in as fast as possible. The playback tool supports csv, so it’s easy to use Excel to create a sample data file (and save it as .csv) or you could write a script to generate sample data (be sure to understand the data format supported by the playback tool before you start building your data set)
- The playback tool can also playback data in a database. So you could use a data generation tool (like this one) to build some test data in a DB and then use the ESP playback tool to play it as a simulated stream
