StackOverflow.com shares your questions, answers, comments, votes, users, badges, etc by doing a public data dump that you can download via BitTorrent.
I take that data, and I turn it into a SQL Server database that you can query. It’s so much better than the Microsoft sample databases because:
- It’s just a handful of easily-understood tables
- It has real-world data distribution
- Sample queries to tune are available at data.stackexchange.com
- It’s big enough to see real performance issues (the 2017-01 version is up to 110GB)
- It’s actually fun to read the data while you’re working with it
If you like playing around with this kind of thing, you can get the latest version now.
Free SQL Server training: the GroupBy session videos are out!