Are you looking for the Northwind Database?

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 imageI’m planning on delivering a BI on SharePoint community night this June. Part of the session will be dedicated for a quick preview on SharePoint Business Data Catalog (BDC). In my quest in looking for a decent data source I stumbled into the Adventure Works database. It was not what I was looking for, way to complicated for the demo! I was looking for a simple data source and Northwind was the answer :-) I started looking for it inside SQL Books Online, apparently Microsoft SQL Server team discontinued Northwind in the 2005 release and presented Adventure Works instead.

If you are like me looking for the Northwind database you can download it from CodePlex here.

Make sure to set the Compatibility mode of the database. Check the screen shots below.

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Right click the Northwind database and click on Properties from the context menu.

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On the Options page set the Compatibility level to the release you’re running, in my case SQL Server 2005.