Sakila

Sakila is a widely used sample database for MySQL designed to illustrate SQL concepts through a fictional DVD rental business. It provides a realistic, normalized schema that supports common querying patterns and reporting tasks.

The schema includes core entities such as film, actor, category, customer, staff, store, inventory, rental, and payment, along with address, city, country, and film_text for full-text search. Two bridge tables—film_actor and film_category—express many-to-many relationships between films and actors, and films and categories. Foreign keys, timestamps, and standard data types are used throughout to demonstrate referential integrity and indexing.

The data set contains sample records for film titles and descriptions, customers and staff, inventory at stores, rental transactions, and payments, enabling queries about availability, sales performance, and customer activity.

Sakila is distributed as part of MySQL’s official sample databases and is widely used in tutorials, training materials, and benchmarking to illustrate database design, SQL querying, and reporting techniques. It serves as a practical example for learning normalization, join operations, and transactional workflows in a relational database context.