Cleaning a Production Database for use in Testing

I'm building a local vm for doing web dev rather than using our on site development. I need a database locally, but I don't want to just pull down a production db and use that as it has information that, while not protected by HIPAA or anythin开发者_如何学Gog, should not be available in the case of laptop theft. Are there any apps or recommended practices to sanitize this data so that I am able to pull down a db, clean it, and install it in my vm?

Clarification: What I'm really looking for is an app that would allow me to mark the specific columns as sensitive and whack those ones whenever I imported a new copy of the DB.

Sounds like what you need is a data generator, one that will populate your database with bogus data. Redgate has a good one, but I don't know if it will work with mysql. Maybe this will help you out?

TRUNCATE table;

or

DELETE FROM table WHERE true;

on any table that you don't want to keep the data of, and then either set dummy values for any sensitive user data, or delete all user data and just turn a few accounts into local testing accounts (user 'testadmin', password 'password', etc).

The more interesting question that you should be asking yourself is: Why does my database not already have skeleton sql migrations that I can run to create a clean database? What happens when you need to create a separate production instance on another server?