This is somewhat framework dependent, but factory_boy supports connecting factories together via SubFactory. There's a real-world example I'm building [0]. See where "author = SubFactory(UserFactory)". I'd imagine there are similar ways to do this for Rails and others too.

[0]: https://github.com/totem-technologies/totem-server/blob/main...

we're actually working on this right, can see the PR here -> https://github.com/nucleuscloud/neosync/pull/1832/files

it's a combination of creating a random number of records for foreign keys i.e 1 customer - create between 2 and 5 transctions. Working on giving you control over that, and handling referential integrity with table constraints (foreign keys, unique constraints, etc.)

ML based approaches typically are not very good at this and struggle with handling things like referential integrity. So a more "procedural" or imperative way is slightly better. The ideal is a combination of both.

Pretty much, yeah. Use normal distribution so you can get some outliers.