Patent ID: 8117219

Claim:
A method for the computer-aided generation of anonymized data records for developing and testing application programs that are intended for use in a productive environment, comprising the steps of: providing at least one productive database containing data records that contain productive data elements to be anonymized; providing at least one non-productive database containing data records that contain data elements; generating a mutual assignment between data records of the nonproductive database and data records of the productive database, based on a respective record number as an unambiguous identifier of an individual record in the respective database wherein precisely one non-productive data record is assigned to each of the productive data records to be anonymized, and wherein the assignment is based on an assignment table that has been generated random-based, wherein the respective record number is stored in the assignment table and not in the anonymized data records; and generating anonymized data records by replacing the data elements to be anonymized in data records from the productive database with data elements of the respectively assigned data records from the nonproductive database, the assignment being maintained during at least one of a generation of new anonymized data records and an updating of the already generated anonymized data records.