In this chapter, we established the fundamentals of the food sales example by presenting the general scenario for The Food Factory: what they do, what they want to accomplish, and, most importantly, how to simulate the data we will need for the rest of the example. We went over various techniques to simulate different kinds of data, like numbers, categories, strings, and dates. The approach we showed is flexible enough to allow you to simulate many different kinds of data in modular and incremental ways. We also showed how to allow flexibility for different assumptions about the simulation to easily take place by using parameter objects. We learned how to create functions that are useful for different scenarios, and how to mix our simulated data with data coming from external sources. Finally, we learned how to work with external MySQL databases.
We are ready to take on...