The following are contrived example databases, which are useful for testing out research ideas. They are all made available in the XMLSQL format of the DBLibrary package, which should be used to import then into a database. Note that you show use the "Save link as" option to download the XMLSQL file to prevent your browser attempting to interpret the xml file.
| Name | Description | XMLSQL file |
| university1 | Database of staff and departments in which they work | download |
| university2 | download | |
| university3 | download | |
| university4 | download | |
| university5 | download | |
| university6 | download | |
| ansisql | A small database that uses a range of ANSI SQL datatypes | download |
For teaching and research in the area of databases, it is useful to have available medium sized databases (meaning data measured in MB, rather than KB or GB) containing `real-world' information to test languages and tools on practical problems. This is a collection of information about how to prepare a relational database from various datasets that have been made publicly available. The first three listed (relational) databases are available online within the Computing Department at Imperial College.
The 1990 Census Gazetteer data has been made publicly available in a set of text files. The technical report Importing the US 1990 Census Data into a Relational DBMS (pdf) the DBLibrary imports this data into an RDB, together with a file of US states supplied here.
The USGS has made publicly available a set of text files containing conprehensive geographical data about the US. The technical report Importing the US Geographical Survey Data into a Relational DBMS (pdf) details how the DBLibrary imports the summary data files into an RDB, together with a file of US states supplied here.
Collected from a number of sources, the Mondial database is available in both XML and relational form. It is often cited as a sample database in recent research work on data integration.
This is a large bibliography of computer science research work, which may be accessed online, as well as being downloadable as a large XML file and there is a simple DTD available for the file. Like Mondial, DBLP is often cited as a sample database in recent research work on data integration.
The complete works of William Shakespeare are available as a XML file
A wide range of literature works are available from the Oxford Text Archive, in a number of formats. The XML format chosen is of interest since it uses mixed mode XML elements (i.e. XML elements that contains character data and nested elements).
A small selection of datasets for testing purposes is avialable from the dbsamples project at the pgfoundry.
A free version of a database that gives the rough location of an IP address, is supplied as the GeoCityLite dataset.