One of the goals of Red Gate Software is that we not only sell products to the SQL Server community, but that we also participate in the community. From the creation of Simple Talk to the acquisition of SQLServerCentral, to hosting the free SQL in the City events, we spend significant resources every year to support anyone that is working with SQL Server. We publish a tremendous amount of new information across all our sites and deliver dozens of technical talks on a variety of subjects.
In line with our goals of participating in the community, we have agreed to host the AdventureWorks 2012 sample database on the Azure platform. This was the brainchild of Jamie Thomson who started hosting the Adventureworks sample database in March of 2012. Using donations from the community, Jamie not only uploaded the AdventureWorks database, but he also added some additional objects to the database. This hosted copy of Adventureworks also contains:
- the Northwind tables (in the Northwind schema)
- large versions of the "Product" and "TransactionHistory" tables with much more data (as tables named bigProduct and bigTransactionHistory).
- included the the historical results of the Olympic Games (in the olympics schema)
The first year Jamie ran this project was so successful, he was able to make a donation on behalf of the SQL Server community to charity.
Red Gate has worked with Jamie to transition this set of databases to our own subscription and will assume the financial responsibility for making this available for the community to use. We hope that you will take advantage of the chance to experiment with a SQL database in the cloud and enhance your skills.
We have created a page at SQLServerCentral where we link to all of the sample databases from Microsoft as well as those provided by other people in the SQL Server community. We also include details for how to connect to our Azure SQL AdventureWorks database.
We hope that you take advantage of this service and experiment with AdventureWorks in the cloud.
The SQLServerCentral staff