How to Kill Your Book Sales | Carsten’s Random Ramblings
I believe the first time I heard about using publically-available Flightstats database for teaching databases was when Jeremy Cole suggested using it in the MySQL training program to demonstrate working with large data sets. I’m not sure it ever got used for that purpose, but others have followed up on the same idea in other contexts. The Flightstats database contains 10 years of US airline flight information, consisting of several Gigabytes of data in a fairly wide table, and so is excellent for talking about optimizations and search strategies.
The article is about book sales, but it really talks about sample databases for demonstration purposes.