title: How can I INSERT 1 million entries to my MySQL DB?
body: <p>I want to test the speed of my SQL queries (update queries) with a real "load" on my DB.  I'm relatively fresh to DB's and I am doing more complex queries than I have before, and I'm getting scared by people talking about performance like "30 seconds for 3000 records to be updated" etc.  So I want to have a concrete experiment showing what my performance will be in production.</p>
  
  <p>To achieve this, I want to add 10k, 100k, 1M, 10M records to my DB and then run my query. </p>
  
  <p>My issue is, how can I do this?  I have a "name" primary key field that must be unique and be &lt;= 15 characters and have alphanumeric entry.  The other fields I want to be the same for all created entries (i.e. a "foo" field I want to start at 10000)</p>
  
  <p>If there's a way to do this and get approximately 1M entries (i.e. could be name collisions) that's fine.  I'm just looking for a benchmarking dataset.  </p>
  
  <p>If there's a <strong>better</strong> way to benchmark my query, I'm all ears.  I'm planning to simply execute and see how long the query says it takes.  </p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit</strong>: It's worth noting that this is for a server and has nothing to do with "The Web" so I don't have access to PHP.  I'm seeing some PHP scripts to populate, is there perhaps a way to have a perl script write out all these queries and then suck them in to the command line mysql tools?</p>