The Sakila sample database

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Every lesson in this tutorial queries the same database, so you load it once and then stop thinking about it. That database is Sakila, which models a chain of 2 DVD rental stores: the films they carry, the customers who rent them, the staff who serve them, and the payments that result. Sakila suits a tutorial because of its size. 1,000 films and 16,044 rentals are enough that a query returns something worth looking at, and there are few enough tables that you can keep the shape of it in your head.

What is in it

Sakila holds 16 tables of data. These are the counts on a freshly loaded copy.

Table	Rows	What it holds
`actor`	200	One row per actor
`address`	603	Street addresses, shared by customers, staff and stores
`category`	16	Film genres
`city`	600	Cities, each belonging to a country
`country`	109	Countries
`customer`	599	One row per customer of either store
`film`	1000	The film catalog, with rental rate and length
`film_actor`	5462	Which actors appear in which films
`film_category`	1000	Which category each film belongs to
`film_text`	1000	Film titles and descriptions, for full text search
`inventory`	4581	Physical copies of films, held at a store
`language`	6	Languages a film can be in
`payment`	16044	One row per payment taken
`rental`	16044	One row per rental, with the dates out and back
`staff`	2	The 2 members of staff
`store`	2	The 2 stores

You can check any of these counts yourself once the next lesson has loaded Sakila. COUNT(*) reports how many rows a table holds:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM actor;

+----------+
| COUNT(*) |
+----------+
|      200 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Sakila also carries 7 views, which are saved queries rather than stored rows: actor_info, customer_list, film_list, nicer_but_slower_film_list, sales_by_film_category, sales_by_store and staff_list. No lesson uses them, but they are there if you want to read how someone else wrote the same joins.

The tables the lessons lean on

You do not need all 16. A handful carry most of the examples.

film is the workhorse. It has text, numbers, dates and a foreign key, so most ideas can be shown against it alone.
language has 6 rows, so a query against it prints a complete result you can check by eye.
customer, address and city chain together through foreign keys, which makes them the natural set for the join lessons.

Where it comes from

Oracle publishes Sakila as a sample database. Its schema file and its data file are covered by the New BSD license, which permits commercial use as long as the notice travels with the files. That notice is reproduced in full in the NOTICE file of the repository that holds these docs. The next lesson downloads Sakila from Oracle and loads it into your server.

Getting Started

Server Development

Using Extensions

Creating Extensions

VillageSQL is a drop-in replacement for MySQL with extensions.

What is in it

The tables the lessons lean on

Where it comes from

See also

VillageSQL is a drop-in replacement for MySQL with extensions.

​What is in it

​The tables the lessons lean on

​Where it comes from

​See also

What is in it

The tables the lessons lean on

Where it comes from

See also