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Where did Microsoft get the “Northwind Traders” data?
So they say, Northwind Traders is the hello world of databases. Am just curious, does anyone know where Microsoft got that data. Was it all randomly generated?
- reiichiroh 4y agoFrom CONTOSO CORPORATION
- giaour 4y agoA team of PMs probably spent a full year putting it together by hand.
- tomcam 4y agoNot certain of this, but I think it was a single PM working part time for a couple of months. It was not a trivial task. Microsoft ran lean and mean back then, even when the company had 5,000-10,000 people.
- FearNotDaniel 4y agoI just walked into Alfreds Futterkiste and bought a family pack of delicious, ready-to-eat data off the shelf.
- tomcam 4y agoI do it old-school. I go shoot my data in the wild and prepare it myself on the kitchen counter.
- tomcam 4y agoI looked into this when I worked there almost 3 decades ago. It was originally the sample database for Microsoft Access, of course, and was the first of its kind. I surveyed pretty much all the database managers made for personal computers at the time, and it was always a pain in the neck to work up something like a usable sample set. It was inspired by (not copied from) customer lists, but of course extensively massaged and completely removing anything that might accidentally seem identifiable. Even back then Microsoft was high profile, so they made sure there was nothing that could get them into trouble. Putting it together was a fairly complex process with considerations for localization, fake city names that didn’t sound bad, somewhat realistic record count, etc.