This post was authored by Jos de Bruijn, Senior Program Manager, SQL Server.

A release the magnitude of SQL Server 2016 deserves a new sample. AdventureWorks, which has been around since the SQL Server 2005 days, has had a good run, but it is time for an upgrade.

Wide World Importers is the new sample for SQL Server. It illustrates how the rich SQL Server feature set can be used in a realistic database. It does not attempt to use every single SQL Server feature, as that would not be realistic. It also showcases the key SQL Server 2016 capabilities and performance enhancements.

Latest release of the sample: wide-world-importers-release

Documentation for the sample: wide-world-importers-documentation

The sample is structured as follows:

The sample also includes a number of scripts that can be used to explore some of the features used in the sample database. In addition, the sample includes two workload drivers, which are small applications that simulate a workload running against the database.

The databases contain sample sales and purchases data starting January 1st, 2013, until May 31st, 2016. The sample includes procedures to generate more sample data, so you can always bring the sample up to the current date. For details, see WideWorldImporters data generation.

The data size is limited to keep the download size reasonable. If you desire a sample database with a larger data size, use the source scripts to create a new sample database, and tweak the parameters in step 6 to increase the data size.

Get started

Send any feedback on the sample to: sqlserversamples@microsoft.com.