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 distributions, lots of different data types, easy to understand tables, simple joins. Some of the tables include:
Users – now up over 14 million rows Posts – over 52 million rows’ worth of questions & answers, 143GB in just the clustered index alone Votes –