DBA.StackExchange.com is a Stack Overflow site that's specifically targeted at database administrators. There tend to be some pretty interesting questions in there - not just for SQL Server, but all kinds of databases - but at the same time, there's also a lot of noise. To help find fun questions, I use The Power of…
Stack: Dumped
Wanna learn the schema of the free Stack Overflow public database? If you want the Full Nelson, it's all documented here. That's a great resource if you're looking to learn more, but generally when you're looking at a data dump and building up demo queries, you wanna get an idea of where the data skews, and how the tables relate.
The nice folks over at StackOverflow.com (shout out, @onlybluefeet) updated their public data dump last month. This time around, I'm giving you two options:
Full size circa 2017/12: 19GB torrent (magnet.) Expands to a ~137GB SQL Server 2008 database. Because it's so large, we distribute it with BitTorrent - if you're new to that, here's detailed BitTorrent instructions.
The nice folks at Stack Overflow publish their entire data set (data included) in XML format. It's tons of fun for demos, but you need a way to get it into a relational database.
The Stack Overflow Data Dump Importer (SODDI) makes this point-and-click easy. Just download the latest release, install it, download the XML exports, and you can import it into MySQL, SQLite, or Microsoft SQL Server.
