I made a new demo/workshop database

For a couple of years now, I’ve taught my SQL Server workshops using a demo database that I constructed way back in 2014. The old demo database I used was modelled on a fictional airline, but the data was made up, and the modelling.. wasn’t great.

Chicago, the city of complicated parking. Photo credit: Sawyer Bengtson on unsplash.com

So I spent a couple of hundred hours to build a new database based on a public dataset from the City of Chicago with parking tickets issued between 1997 and 2017. I’ve also refined this dataset with more details from other public sources – from ZIP codes, to socioeconomic indicators, to weather information and more.