Most DBMSes come with sample databases. You can write lots of interesting queries against them, and usually a tutorial accompanies the database in the documentation. For MySQL, there's the Employees sample database: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/employee/en/ and also the Sakila sample database: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/sakila/en/ Also: Kaggle is full of sample data: https://www.kaggle.com/ Wikipedia publishes all of the content of Wikipeida as SQL scripts for MySQL, plus as XML files. You can get that data (or subsets of it) and play around. Load a small one or a huge one, get to work writing queries on it. Here's a github repository with lots of interesting data sets: https://github.com/awesomedata/awesome-public-datasets FiveThirtyEight has lots of neat sets: https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/ There's a website called "Relational Data Set Repository" which has bunches of sets: https://relational.fit.cvut.cz/ data.world has more than 30 data sets: https://data.world/datasets/database Someone manages this git repository that lists some interesting sets: https://github.com/joschout/RelationalDatasets Answer from mikeblas on reddit.com