Nick's Gaming Emporium
A large, realistic sample database for PostgreSQL and SQL Server.
NGE is a free, open-source sample database: the full 30-year life of a fictional video-game retailer, from 1986 to 2016. The company is invented, but the product catalogue is a real game-release list, so the sales data feels believable rather than random. It comes in four sizes, from laptop-friendly up to about 3TB, and covers a transactional (OLTP) schema, a star-schema data warehouse, and a web layer, with the same data available on both engines.
Download
Prebuilt backups for both engines: a SQL Server backup (.bak) and a PostgreSQL custom-format dump (.dump) per tier. v0.2.0
| Tier | PostgreSQL | SQL Server |
|---|---|---|
| tiny | nge_tiny.dump | .bak |
| small | nge_small.dump | .bak |
| medium | nge_medium.dump | .bak |
| large (about 3TB) | nge_large.dump | striped: 1of3, 2of3, 3of3 |
Verify a download against the checksums: PostgreSQL SHA256SUMS, SQL Server SHA256SUMS.
Restore (PostgreSQL)
createdb nge_small
pg_restore -d nge_small -j 4 nge_small.dump
psql -d nge_small -c "ANALYZE;"The dump carries no planner statistics, so run ANALYZE after restoring. There is no hardcoded collation, so it restores on any locale (create the target as UTF-8). Full instructions for both engines, checksums, and flags are in the README.
What's inside
- OLTP: shops, staff, customers, sales, trade-ins, refunds, multi-currency.
- Data warehouse: a star schema with dimensions, fact tables, and rollups.
- Web layer: accounts, reviews, and page views.
- Reporting and workload: reporting procedures and a workload generator over the warehouse.
It is generated deterministically, so a given tier rebuilds to identical rows every time, which makes it reproducible for teaching and for filing issues. The small classics like pagila and Chinook are ideal when you want something tiny to spin up in seconds; NGE is for the opposite case, when you want realistic data at a scale that actually exercises a query planner.