Obfuscate / Mask / Scramble personal information

Question

I'm looking for a homegrown way to scramble production data for use in development and test. I've built a couple of scripts that make random social security numbers, shift birth dates, scramble emails, etc. But I've come up against a wall trying to scramble customer names. I want to keep real names so we can still use or searches so random letter generation is out. What I have tried so far is building a temp table of all last names in the table then updating the customer table with a random selection from the temp table. Like this:

DECLARE @Names TABLE (Id int IDENTITY(1,1),[Name] varchar(100))

/* Scramble the last names (randomly pick another last name) */
INSERT @Names SELECT LastName FROM Customer ORDER BY NEWID();
WITH [Customer ORDERED BY ROWID] AS
(SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY NEWID()) AS ROWID, LastName FROM Customer)
UPDATE [Customer ORDERED BY ROWID] SET LastName=(SELECT [Name] FROM @Names WHERE ROWID=Id)

This worked well in test, but completely bogs down dealing with larger amounts of data (>20 minutes for 40K rows)

All of that to ask, how would you scramble customer names while keeping real names and the weight of the production data?

UPDATE: Never fails, you try to put all the information in the post, and you forget something important. This data will also be used in our sales & demo environments which are publicly available. Some of the answers are what I am attempting to do, to 'switch' the names, but my question is literally, how to code in T-SQL?

Answer 1

I use generatedata. It is an open source php script which can generate all sorts of dummy data.