

Ask HN: Learning to tune a database - catch404

I've been wanting to expand my knowledge around databases and sql/tuning. I've worked mostly with Oracle and would like to learn Postgres.<p>My problem is: With a programming language, I can do the 'Hello world' app and progress from there. With a database I need a different problem to solve or a different dataset to work with. I'm not going to learn much about tuning if I release a little used webapp :)<p>I bet there are plently of datasets around that I could load and mash up but I'm not too such on where to start.<p>Any suggestions?
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wooster
Sure. Make an app that stores a very large amount of data. A good example
would be spidering web data (unstructured), parsing some structure from it,
and storing it in a database. Then, do some analysis on it, expose it to the
web, etc.

The important thing is either to:

a) Have a lot of data.

or

b) Have a lot of traffic.

The first is a lot easier to get than the second.

~~~
trapper
And both are simple to simulate :)

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codeodor
I think you want more than a lot of data.

That's a good start, but you also want it to be structured in a way that
requires some thought (or just in 3+ normal form). Have someone ask for a
report out of it (or come up with as many reports as you can).

I wish I had a suggestion for such a data set. Microsoft's famous case is
Northwind, but I don't know where you might find it (without having searched
just now).

