title: Anonymizing customer data for development or testing
body: <p>I need to take production data with real customer info (names, address, phone numbers, etc) and move it into a dev environment, but I'd like to remove any semblance of <em>real</em> customer info.</p>
  
  <p>Some of the answers to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/157600/data-generators-for-sql-server">this question</a> can help me generating NEW test data, but then how do I replace those columns in my production data, but keep the other relevant columns?</p>
  
  <p>Let's say I had a table with 10000 fake names. Should I do a cross-join with a SQL update? Or do something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>UPDATE table
  SET lastname = (SELECT TOP 1 name FROM samplenames ORDER By NEWID())
  </code></pre>