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Reference Databases

June 6th, 2026

As part of my day-to-day work, I often need to run the tooling I’m working on against databases to test it. The databases need to have a variaty of different schemas and data in them to do a representative test. A big problem with this is getting hold of an array of different databases in the first place. This problem is compounded further by the fact that the tooling I work on supports five different database platforms, so there is a need for different databases for each platform.

A useful source of ready-made databases is the reference databases that are provided by the vendor or community around each database. The ones I’ve found so far are listed below, with a bit of detail about what each one represents.

SQL Server

Name	Description	Install
AdventureWorks	A fictional bicycle manufacturer “Adventure Works Cycles”, containing data including manufacturing, sales, purchasing, product management, contact management, and human resources. Available in Online transactional (OLTP), Data warehousing (DW), and Lightweight (LT) formats.	backups scripts
Chinook	A fictional digital media store, containing data including artists, albums, tracks, invoices, and customers.	script
Contoso	“Contoso Corporation”, a fictional multinational business (more info here), containing data including manufacturing, sales, and products.	scripts
Northwind	“Northwind Traders”, a fictional importer/exporter of speciality foods from around the world, containing sales data including customers, orders, inventory, purchasing, suppliers, shipping, employees, and accounting.	scripts
WideWorldImporters	“Wide World Importers”, a fictional wholesale novelty goods importer and distributor operating from the San Francisco bay area (more info here), containing data including purchasing, sales and stock. Available in Online transactional (OLTP) and Data warehousing (DW) formats.	backups

Stack Exchange / StackOverflow

The databases behind the many sites in the Stack Exchange network can be downloaded here. The database for each Stack Exchange site can be downloaded, including that for StackOverflow. However, the StackOverflow database is quite big (~65GB), so it has been split up into several files. That makes it non-trivial to get it into a SQL Server database.

Brent Ozar has simplified this process by providing downloads of the database files in SQL Server 2016 format.

PostgreSQL

Name	Description	Install
AdventureWorks	A port of the SQL Server version of AdventureWorks, a fictional bicycle manufacturer “Adventure Works Cycles”, containing data including manufacturing, sales, purchasing, product management, contact management, and human resources.	script
Chinook	A port of the SQL Server version of Chinook, a fictional digital media store, containing data including artists, albums, tracks, invoices, and customers.	script
Pagila	A database of a fictional DVD rental store, containing data including films, actors, customers, staff, and payments.	scripts

Bluebox

Ryan Booz has created Bluebox, a database based on Pagila that aims to make it more full-featured.

NYC Census

If using PostGIS (an extension for managing spatial data), the introduction to PostGIS tutorial contains a sample database of census data for New York City.

Other Databases

The PostgreSQL website has a long list of other sample databases, including IMDB, the UK land registry of sales, and OpenStreetMap.

MySQL / MariaDB

Name	Description	Install
Bureau of Transportation Statistics	A database of US commercial airline flight data including airlines, airports, and flights.	scripts
Employees	A database containing generated data including employees, departments, employees, and salaries.	scripts
Sakila	A fictional DVD rental store, containing data including films, actors, customers, staff, and payments.	scripts
World	A database containing information about the countries and cities of the world, containing data including countries, cities, and languages spoken.	script

Other Databases

The MySQL website has a list of other sample databases, including some with large data sets.

Oracle

Oracle themselves provide some interlinked sample schemas:

Customer Orders (CO)
Human Resources (HR)
Online Catalog (OC)
Order Entry (OE)
Product Media (PM)
Sales History (SH)

These are documented on the Oracle site, and can be obtained from the Oracle samples GitHub repository.

Name	Description	Install
OT	A global fictitious company that sells computer hardware including storage, motherboard, RAM, video card, and CPU.	scripts
O7	A schema for a fictitious bank, containing customers, accounts, products, branches, departments, and employees.	scripts (see section 2)

Gerenal data sources

There are many sites that provide data suitable for using as a reference database. While many of these sites provide the data, few of them provide it in a format that can be loaded straight into the relevant database platform. They can however be imported fairly trivially.

Name	Description
Google Dataset Search	A search engine for datasets from across the internet.
Kaggle	Datasets for data science and machine learning. Interesting datasets include NBA Basketball and Spotify.
UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository	Well-documented and clean data sources, mainly geared towards machine learning.
Awesome Public Data Sets	A list of high quality, topic-centric public data sources.
Data Is Plural	A weekly newsletter and archive of real-world datasets.
Hugging Face	A huge set of data, mainly targeted at machine learning.

DDD South West 14

May 17th, 2026

I’ve just got back from another DDD South West. It’s the last time at the Engine Shed, the venue it’s been at for several years. It’s a shame, as the venue is perfect for an event like this, and the food is excellent.

This year I was a speaker, doing a session on sketchnoting. It’s the first time I’ve given this talk, and I got the whole audience sketching along with me during the session. Several people also took my challenge to sketchnote a session during the rest of the day. Hopefully they will continue to do so at other events.

2026: The Year Of The Software Factory

by Rich Woollcott

Using Claude To Access Data And Make Smarter Decisions

by Elizabeth Hanson

Playing With AI Locally

by Paul Michaels

From Developer To Architect, The Career Path Nobody Explained

by John Kilmister

Do We Really Need A New Playbook For AI?

by Stuart Caborn

Why Don’t People Seem To Be Able To Diagnose Problems These Days?

by Richard Fennell

Extracting a DACPAC

March 24th, 2026

SQL Server has the concept of data-tier applications. This is a way of defining the structure and data of an entire database within a single file, enabling it to be moved between machines. There are two types of files that can be used:

BACPAC - This contains the database schema and the data from a database.
DACPAC - This contains the just the database schema by default, but data from some tables can be included.

Data-tier applications have benefits over backup files in that they are more portable. Backups are tied to the version of SQL Server that they are created with, meaning that only that version or later can restore them.

I use DACPACs a lot to get database schemas between different servers. Deploying a DACPAC will sometimes fail due to it containing logins, users, etc… from the database it was created from that don’t exist on the server it is being deployed to. When this happens, SQL Server Management Studio simply fails with an error with no way around the issue.

It is possible to deploy however, but it takes a bit of command line trickery. To do this, first install the SqlPackage dotnet tool:

 dotnet tool install -g microsoft.sqlpackage

Once installed, you can run it from the command line, passing the option to exclude certain object types. Something like:

sqlpackage
  /Action:Publish
  /TargetServerName:.\SQL2025
  /TargetDatabaseName:Northwind
  /Properties:ExcludeObjectTypes="Users;RoleMembership;Logins;ServerRoles;ServerRoleMembership;Permissions"
  /SourceFile:northwind.dacpac

It’s the /Properties:ExcludeObjectTypes=... parameter that does the magic. In this case, the security-related objects causing the deploy to fail will be excluded from the deployed database schema.

More details can be found in the docs for the SqlPackage publish action.

nor(DEV):con 2026

February 28th, 2026

I’ve just returned from nor(DEV):con, an event I previously went to a few years ago.

Designing Services That Stand The Test Of Time

by Paul Grenyer

Stop Testing! (My Patience)

by Ryan Healey

Modular Monoliths And Other Facepalms

by Kevlin Henney

Debugging Your Imposter Syndrome

by Vickie Allen-Collier

Learn How To Learn

by Frances Buontempo

Translating Business Metrics Into Meaningful User Outcomes

by Elisabeth Dubus

How We Support Deploying Multi-Cloud Apps At Stack Overflow

by Chris O’Dell

NDC London 2026

February 2nd, 2026

After a three year hiatus, last week I returned to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster to attend NDC London.

QE II Centre

As I’ve done before, I was part of the crew helping out at the event. In exchange for a free ticket, you help out with the setup and registration of attendees, and spend 50% of each day room monitoring. While I did not know most of the crew when I turned up, we formed our own little community within the conference and got to know each other in just a few days.

NDC Crew 2026