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Stack Overflow

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2022-06)

Last Updated August 12, 2022

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, shares a version of their data in XML format from time to time, and then I import it into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data distributions, lots of different data types, easy to…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-06)

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, publicly exports their data every couple/few months. @TarynPivots (their DBA) tweets about it, and then I pull some levers and import the XML data dump into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data…

Download the Current Stack Overflow Database for Free (2021-02)

Last Updated June 17, 2021

Stack Overflow, the place where most of your production code comes from, publicly exports their data every couple/few months. @TarynPivots (their DBA) tweets about it, and then I pull some levers and import the XML data dump into SQL Server format. Stack Overflow’s database makes for great blog post examples because it’s real-world data: real data…

Updated Stack Overflow Public Data Set for June 2019

Last Updated June 6, 2019

The place that saves your job Taryn and the kind folks at Stack Overflow have updated their public XML data dump for June, so I’ve imported that into an updated sample database for your blogging and presenting satisfaction. You can download the 40GB torrent (magnet) and it expands to a ~350GB SQL Server 2008 database. Because…

A Presenter’s Guide to the Stack Overflow Database

Last Updated August 8, 2018

The place that saves your job You present on SQL Server topics at user groups and conferences, and you’ve been wondering how to get started with the Stack Overflow public database. Here’s a quick list of things to know. For stable demos, use StackOverflow2010. This smaller 10GB database has data from the first years of…

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2018-06)

Last Updated November 26, 2020

@Taryn and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump, which I then take and import into SQL Server for teaching performance tuning. You can download the 38GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip files…

sp_BlitzIndex @Mode = 2

Creating Basic Indexes on the Stack Overflow Public Database

Last Updated September 3, 2017

Indexing, Stack Overflow

My public SQL Server database copy of the Stack Overflow data dump only includes clustered indexes by default. I want to keep your database size as small as possible for quick downloading. But like any database – when you create it, should you add your own indexes to make queries go faster? The answer lies…

New Stack Overflow Public Database Available (2017-06)

Last Updated July 6, 2017

Nick Craver and the kind folks at Stack Overflow publish their data export periodically with your questions, answers, comments, user info, and more. It’s available as an XML data dump, which I then take and import into SQL Server for teaching performance tuning. You can download the 16GB torrent (magnet), which gives you a series of 7Zip…

When Always On Isn’t: Handling Outages in Your Application

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Stack Overflow

Today’s brief Stack Overflow outage reminded me of something I’ve always wanted to blog about: Stack Overflow is in limp-home mode There’s a gray bar across the top that says, “This site is currently in read-only mode; we’ll return with full functionality soon.” That’s not a hidden feature of Always On Availability Groups. Rather, it’s a…

How to Download the Stack Overflow Database

Last Updated July 21, 2022

I use a Microsoft SQL Server version of the public Stack Overflow data export for my blog posts and training classes because it’s way more interesting than a lot of sample data sets out there. It’s easy to learn, has just a few easy-to-understand tables, and has real-world data distributions for numbers, dates, and strings.…

Update on Stack Overflow’s Recovery Strategy with SQL Server 2014

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, Stack Overflow

Back in 2009 (wow, seems like only yesterday!), I wrote about designing a recovery strategy for Stack Overflow. Back then, I wrote: With these answers in mind, Stack Overflow’s decisions not to do transaction log backups, offsite log shipping, database mirroring, and so on make good business sense. Us geeks in the crowd may not like it,…

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Always On AGs at StackOverflow

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Always On Availability Groups, SQL Server, Stack Overflow

I recently finished helping the StackExchange team migrate their SQL Server 2008 infrastructure to SQL Server 2012. These servers power StackOverflow, DBA.StackExchange.com, the new AskPatents partnership with the US Patent and Trademark Office, and hundreds of other Q&A sites that together form one of the biggest web site networks. It’s one of the most visible…

StackOverflow VC, SQL Server, and Whuffie

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Yesterday StackOverflow announced that they’d accepted $6 million in venture capital funding. Joel Spolsky held a quick public chat to discuss it, and there were some interesting questions from the audience. I’m going to paraphrase some of the questions and give my own answers. Q: Now that StackOverflow is going to be big, will they…

How to REALLY Compress Your SQL Server Backups

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Stack Overflow

StackOverflow’s database servers are hosted in a colo facility. They pay by the byte for transfer in and out of their servers, so it’s really crucial to compress the database backups as much as possible. The smaller the backups, the less they pay. They’re already using backup compression, but they wanted to explore more ways…

Designing a Recovery Strategy for StackOverflow

Last Updated February 13, 2017

Backup and Recovery, Stack Overflow

When I design a backup & recovery strategy for a database, I don’t talk to the developers, database administrators, or systems administrators first. The first people I go to are the business managers, and I ask three questions: How much money would you lose if you lost the data altogether? How much money would you…

New StackOverflow database server coming

Last Updated February 9, 2017

SQL Server for StackOverflow Today, Jeff Atwood blogged about StackOverflow’s new SQL Server hardware: a Lenovo RD120, the artist formerly known as an IBM x346. Notice the big heart on the box. Servers run faster with love. Next, I’m aiming to do log shipping from the box pictured here over to Amazon S3. The StackOverflow…

StackOverflow’s SQL 2008 FTS issue solved

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Whew – the Microsoft folks really came through on this one and tracked down the problem pretty quickly. I want to personally thank Denis Churin, Nikita Shamgunov and Sundaram Narayanan for their detailed investigation into the issue and helping us get it fixed. I’m going to explain the issue to help anybody else get through…

SQL 2008 upgrade & tuning for StackOverflow.com

Last Updated February 9, 2017

I’ve mentioned Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com a few times over the years here, and it bears repeating: he writes a great blog for developers, and DBAs need to read it too. I also follow him on Twitter, and a couple of weeks ago he mentioned he was having problems deciphering execution plans: Holy cow –…

A little ninja work before breakfast

Last Updated February 9, 2017

Mornings like this, I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff: That’s Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror and Stack Overflow, whose blog I’ve been reading for years. I actually bought a t-shirt with his site’s logo way back in 2006. Jeff effing Atwood. If I saw him, I’d ask for his autograph on…