The best way to improve your skills as a database professional is to practice. If you’re like me, you might even take that practice outside of the workplace and do a bit of homework on the side. You can’t take a copy of your production database home with you, so what can you do? Thankfully, the fine people Microsoft have put together a set of databases that you can download and play with.
AdventureWorks is a transactional database for a fictional bicycle and outdoor supply company. It’s not very exciting data and it’s not terribly big data, but it gives developers a highly normalized schema to work with for testing different querying techniques. How Microsoft managed to cram all of the relevant SQL Server features into a 215MB database is beyond me. All that aside, AdventureWorks is the first place that database professionals should go to get started practicing their skills.
There are a number of downloads available for AdventureWorks, but only a few that matter to the OLTP crowd. To get started, database professionals should download one of the following:
For a local database, go with one of the first two options – just drop the files in their appropriate folders, attach the database, and then you’re off to the races. If you want something for Azure, use the script file to create the database and deploy data.
Protip: There’s usually a CS option for each of these. The CS lets you know it’s a case sensitive option. If you want to deal with international databases, pick the CS version.
A full list of AdventureWorks OLTP options is available at http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/. There are some light weight data warehouse options available, but they are still relatively small. If you’re just getting started, those are a good option (especially since there’s an SSAS tutorial available).
Let’s say you want to do something a bit more adventurous and you want to branch out into the bigger BI world that Microsoft has to offer. The AdventureWorks data sets are a great starting place, but the data set size doesn’t pose many challenges.
The Contoso Retail DW data set is several times the size of AdventureWorks and comes as a pre-built star schema. While it’s not the biggest database (my copy is around 1.6GB), ContosoRetailDW provides a large enough data set where aspiring database professionals can really start to push the limits of a local SQL Server.
ContosoRetailDW is also a good place to try out Enterprise Edition features like table partitioning and ColumnStore indexes. The data set is large enough that it’s possible to make use of these features but it’s still small enough that you won’t need enterprise grade hardware to accomplish these things in a reasonable amount of time.
Database professionals, this is your chance to start exploring the features and functionality that SQL Server has to offer. The sample databases from Microsoft give you plenty of opportunities to work with different techniques for both OLTP and data warehouse and even familiarize yourself with Azure without having to come up with your own data.
