Feb 19, 2018

The king is dead, long live the king!

Everyone, who deal with SQL server, know sample database AdventureWorks, which has been with us since the days of SQL Server 2005. Most of official SQL Server documentation, third-party educational literature and authorized courses use this database.

It is time for changes and Microsoft decided that SQL Server 2016 deserves a new sample database.

Meet WideWorldImporters – a new official sample database, which completely adapted for SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

New sample present the core capabilities for hybrid transaction/analytics processing (HTAP) workload, as well as transaction processing (OLTP) workload, analytical processing (OLAP) and data warehousing workloads. Demonstrated key features and performance improvements, and show how the rich SQL Server (since 2016) feature set, can be used in a realistic database.

The database comes in two major types:

WideWorldImporters: Sample database for OnLine transaction processing (OLTP) which is commonly used SQL Server database engine. This type will be helpful for those who are new and learning relational database management systems (RDBMS) using SQL Server.

WideWorldImportersDW: Sample database for OnLine analytical processing (OLAP), useful for playing with business intelligence features of the SQL Server.

The data warehouse sample database depends on the OLTP sample database, so this database needs to be installed along with the OLTP sample.
Database size is limited, for easily downloading, but more data in the database can be generated by stored procedure – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sample/world-wide-importers/data-generation

To get started: