Faking data with Mockaroo

Faking data is a very important topic for anyone working with data pipelines. You are not always able to use real data. This could be for many reasons, including legal and company policies. In fact, this has often been the case for me. Faking data can also be problematic because does the fake data fully resemble your real data? Probably not. I think for this purpose we are mimicking real data, so it’s perfectly fine.

Mockaroo is a free hosted data service that can also be used to create simple REST APIs. Here, I created our three raw data schemas and then clicked on the button that says CREATE API.

Here, we are creating a schema for our machine API. We are using two Number and one Binomial Distribution column types. When done, you can click CREATE API.

Figure 12.9: Mockaroo machine schema

Next, we are creating a schema for our sales API. We are using several columns, as outlined in the following figure. When done...