Good Databases with sample data

Question

Does anybody know of any sample databases I could download, preferably in CSV or some similar easy to import format so that I could get more practice in working with different types of data sets? The Canadian Department of Environment has historical weather data that you can download. Unfortunately it's not in a format I can import into any other database, and you can only query it based on the included program which is actually quite limited in what kind of data it can provide. Does anybody know of any interesting data sets that are freely available?

Answer 1

What database engine are you importing into? That will help determine what formats you can include in your search.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has some sample data for download in CSV format.

Answer 2

For Microsoft SQL Server, there is the Northwind Sample DB and AdventureWorks.

Answer 3

I'm looking for something that I could import into MySQL, but MS SQL Server would also suffice. CSV can be imported just about anywhere, so that would be ideal.

Answer 4

The datawrangling blog posted a nice list a while back:

http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web

Includes financial, government data (labor, housing, etc.), and too many more to list here.

Answer 5

See this question. It links to an Access db and CSV files covering baseball stats since like 1817.

Answer 6

You can probably find the Northwind sample database for SQLServer

It might be overkill but you can install OracleXE, I think it comes with some sample schemas or you can find the old Scott schema online.

Also, in stephen bohlen's Summer of NHibernate screen-cast series he creates a sample database, the code comes with it in xml files and you can import it like he describes in the screencast (maybe episode 2 or 3) and just not delete it later.

Answer 7

UnData and Swivel are both good sources for data. Any database should be able to import CSV files.

Answer 8

You could try the Netflix Prize data set.

Answer 9

There's also theinfo.org, which is mentioned in that datawrangling blog post. They have their own page of data sets.

Answer 10

For PostgreSQL, see these samples

Answer 11

A lot of the data in Stack Overflow is licensed under the create commons. Every month they release a data dump with all the questions, answers, comments, and votes.

Answer 12

Good sources for free data:

http://infochimps.org/datasets

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/where_to_find_open_data_on_the.php

Answer 13

For MySQL there are quite a few sample database at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/

1. world (world countries and cities)
2. sakila (video rental)
3. employee

Answer 14

For Firebird you have employee.fdb

on windows OS, it is located there C:\Program Files\Firebird\Firebird_2_1\examples\empbuild

Answer 15

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has a data-store, http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store, full of categorized datasets. They're all ultimately stored as Google Documents, so you can export them into csv & Excel.

Answer 16

There's a whole bunch of free SQL Server sample databases on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=SqlServerSamples#databases

One very simple way to get sample data is use full applications. I needed some sample data to practice what I was learning with MySQL at the time and just downloaded PHPBB and used their provided database. If you need to add users etc, just use the program to do it.

Think generic. You can get weather data from common sources for free, thetvdb.com has a pretty nifty set of data for TV show episodes for free, sites like last.fm have a tonne of data available for music listening habits. If you just want sample data, the easiest way to get it is not thinking in terms of "I want a database". Think "what freely available data is out there".