Fictional company

Ostrander Pump & Valve Co. does not exist. Its people, customers, suppliers, products, data and documents are all synthetic, created for demos and prototyping. Every image on this site is AI-generated.

OSTRANDERPUMP & VALVE CO.

A make-believe manufacturer, built to test data agents

Ostrander Pump & Valve is a 52-year-old pump and valve maker from Rockford, Illinois, that never existed. I built it, along with five generations of its business systems, to find out how different ways of building AI data agents hold up against the kind of database real companies actually have.

The company's recent years are simulated day by day, through October 2026: orders, shipments, invoices, payroll, machine telemetry, warranty claims and the rest, on top of thinner history going back further. The result is one PostgreSQL database with the scars of every system that ever wrote to it. That database is the test bed.

OSTRANDER PUMP & VALVE CO.

Rockford, Ill. · Synthetic data estate

Tables
446
Rows
81 million
Size
10 GB
Systems
5 generations
Leftover tables
121
Documented traps
200
Employees
≈ 260, 2 plants

Est. 1974 · Fictional

AI-generated photo of a navy split-case pump on a factory test loop with large blue pipes
The Rockford pump test loop. AI-generated, like every person and place inside the company.

Why build a fake company

Real data estates are messy, and demos rarely are

Most demos of AI agents that answer questions from a database use a dozen clean, well-named tables. Real company databases grow by accretion: a system from the 1980s, a port that kept its six-character names, a web app bolted on later, an acquisition that never got fully merged. Questions that sound simple, like "what did we ship to this customer last year?", cross three of them.

Real company data can't be published or shared, so I made a company instead, with a history that explains why its data looks the way it does. Because I generated it, I also know the right answer to every question, which makes agents' answers gradable.

  1. 1974Walt Ostrander founds Ostrander Pump Works in Rockford.
  2. 1988An AS/400 ERP, PRISM, goes in.
  3. 2009PRISM is ported to PostgreSQL without renaming anything.
  4. 2014A maintenance module is bolted on.
  5. 2016A Rails order system, OPS, is built.
  6. 2019A shop-floor system, FloorLink, starts logging machines.
  7. 2021OPV buys Kessler Valve of Tulsa, FoxPro system and all.
  8. 2022A UPS fire in the server closet takes everything down for two days.
  9. 2023New accounting module; payroll comes in-house.
  10. 2023–24An analyst builds a reporting warehouse, then leaves.
  11. 2026The database moves to Google Cloud.
  12. Oct 2026IT announces IMPEL, a program to get OPV's data ready for AI agents.

What an agent runs into

Every trap is catalogued, and the true answers are kept in a separate answer key that agents can't see.

What is being tested

Four ways to give an agent the data

The benchmark asks when each approach is the right one: a managed natural-language query service, hand-built tools, or an agent that writes its own SQL from catalog metadata. Each runs as six business agents (customer service, production supervisor, purchasing, finance, operations and quality, and sales) on operational and analytical tasks, scored for accuracy, latency and cost.

Q

QueryData

Google's QueryData API turns the question into SQL, guided by a tuned context set of query templates, facets and value searches, and scoped to the tables each agent needs.

T

Custom tools

Hand-designed, parameterized SQL tools served by MCP Toolbox. The agent picks a tool and fills in its arguments; it never writes SQL.

T+S

Custom tools plus SQL

The same tools, with a guarded execute_sql escape hatch for questions the tools don't cover.

F

Catalog plus SQL

No custom tools. The agent searches Knowledge Catalog for table descriptions, a business glossary and document passages, then writes its own SQL.

All four share the same model, the same simulated users, graders and scenarios. Each approach is built with full knowledge of the data, so the test measures how well it works in competent hands, not how easy the data is to figure out.

The company's paperwork

Documents an agent can read, as a real company would have them

OPV has department manuals, a systems history from IT, memos about the Kessler acquisition, an annual report, a product catalog and a quarterly employee newsletter, The Impeller. Figures in them come from the simulated data, and the people named in the newsletters are rows in the employee table. Some passages are out of date on purpose, as real manuals are.

Cover of the fictional OPV 2025 annual report
2025 annual report
Front page of The Impeller newsletter, Summer 2025, with a canoe race photo
The Impeller, Summer 2025
First sheet of the fictional OPV engineering drawing set
Engineering drawing set

For invited testers

The OPV intranet

Lookup screens for orders, the parts catalog, the shop floor, support cases, CRM and finance, a shared drive with the company's documents, and OPVChat, which puts the four agents side by side on the same question.

Sign-in is by invitation only, with a Google account that has been added to the test group.

Open the intranet →