Sample data you can use for training – Michael

When learning more about data modelling, data engineering or when improving your Excel or Power BI skills you need some data.

In this post I’ll introduce you to a number of good datasets and sources you can use for your training.

Contoso

Contoso is a fictional company that’s heavily used by Microsoft in a number of situations. It’s used by Microsoft when they need to represent a company, it’s infrastructure or it’s data in presentations, training, etc.

The wonderful people of SQLBI maintain a Contoso Data Generator, a free open-source tool to generate start-schema databases for Contoso.

Besides the generator there is ready to use data you can download in a number of formats, such as csv, delta, parquet or pbix. You can also pick the dataset size you want, going form 10k orders to 100 million orders.

Kaggle

Kaggle is Your home for Data Science. Besides code, models and competitions they also have a very large selection of datasets.

Perfect to practice your data modelling, Power Query and other skills!

World Wide Importers

Wide World Importers (WWI) is a wholesale novelty goods importer and distributor operating from the San Francisco bay area.

As a wholesaler, WWI’s customers are mostly companies who resell to individuals. WWI sells to retail customers across the United States including specialty stores, supermarkets, computing stores, tourist attraction shops, and some individuals. WWI also sells to other wholesalers via a network of agents who promote the products on WWI’s behalf. While all of WWI’s customers are currently based in the United States, the company is intending to push for expansion into other countries/regions.

The World Wide Importers database from Microsoft is an extensive database that’s available for SQL server or Synapse Analytics.

WWI as it’s affectionately know contains a large number of tables such as sales, purchasing, invoicing and warehousing. It has multiple schema’s for various purposes and contains a number of SQL server features.

You can download the World Wide Importers database and find documentation here.