This is a section with links to data sources. During my data engineer coaching we need to find good data sets to work with. So, I started this section to make it easier to find good sources.
I've taken these links from articles and blog posts. Why not only link the articles? You know, these posts can go away at any time. I want to keep the links to the platforms either way.
I haven't had the chance to check each link myself. Please let me know if something isn't right.
You can find the articles on the bottom of this section to read more. They include even more data sources I haven't had time to add to this list.
- Student Favorites
- Content Marketing
- Crime
- Drugs
- Education
- Entertainment
- Environmental And Weather Data
- Financial And Economic Data
- General And Academic
- Government And World
- Health
- Human Rights
- Labor And Employment Data
- Politics
- Retail
- Social
- Source Articles and Blog Posts
- Travel And Transportation
- Various Portals
In my Coaching program my students learn by doing a project. And the foundation of every project is selecting a dataset. That can be an API or a file source, depending a lot on the student's goals and interests.
Working out goals for the dataset, figuring out the data modeling, creating the architecture and building it. It's a fun way to learn and get better at Data Engineering.
Here's a list of my student's favorite datasets and APIs
Building a project? Use my project README template to document it properly: template-readme.md
| Dataset | Description |
|---|---|
| Fraud detection | Simulated credit card transactions labeled as fraudulent or legitimate, ideal for classification and imbalanced-data projects. |
| Industrial equipment monitoring | Sensor readings from industrial equipment (temperature, pressure, vibration) for predictive maintenance and anomaly detection. |
| Energy demand & generation | Four years of hourly electricity consumption, generation, prices and weather data for Spain, great for time-series forecasting. |
| Online Retail | Transactional data from a UK online retailer, useful for customer segmentation, market basket and RFM analysis. |
| Brazilian E-commerce | Olist's public dataset of 100k+ orders with customers, products, payments, reviews and geolocation for end-to-end analytics. |
| Beijing Air Quality | Hourly air pollutant readings across multiple Beijing stations with weather data, good for time-series and environmental analysis. |
| NYC Taxi | New York City taxi trip and revenue data for cab drivers, useful for revenue, tipping and time-series analysis. |
| E-commerce clickstream & transactions | Simulated online shopping clickstream and transaction data — user sessions, page views, clicks and purchases — good for funnel and behavior analysis. |
| IESO Ontario electricity data | Public report files from Ontario's grid operator: electricity demand, generation by fuel type, market prices and more, updated regularly as CSV/XML. |
| IoT device temperature readings | Temperature sensor readings from IoT devices with indoor/outdoor tags and timestamps, great for time-series and anomaly detection. |
| IoT agriculture 2024 | Smart-farming sensor data (soil moisture, temperature, humidity, etc.) for agriculture monitoring and IoT analytics projects. |
| API | Description |
|---|---|
| Bike sharing Bluebikes | Trip and station data for Boston's Bluebikes bike-share system, including GBFS real-time feeds and downloadable trip history. |
| Bike sharing Divvy Bikes | Trip and station data for Chicago's Divvy bike-share system, with GBFS real-time feeds and historical ride files. |
| Weather API | Weather API with current conditions, forecasts, historical data and astronomy; generous free tier. |
| Bluesky API | API for the Bluesky social network (AT Protocol): posts, profiles, feeds and social graph data. |
| Guardian news API | Access to The Guardian's articles, tags and sections; great for text and news analysis, free with an API key. |
| Football API | Football (soccer) data API: fixtures, live scores, standings, teams, players and statistics across many leagues. |
| HSL Helsinki public transport | Open transit data for the Helsinki region: routes, schedules, GTFS feeds, real-time vehicle positions and a routing API. |
| Digitransit map API | Background map and vector tiles API for building transit and mobility maps (Finland/Helsinki region). |
| Open-Meteo | Free open-source weather API with forecasts, historical data and air quality, no API key required. |
| Finnish Meteorological Institute open data | Weather observations, forecasts and climate data for Finland, served via open WFS/download APIs. |
| OpenWeatherMap | Weather API with current conditions, forecasts and historical data via the One Call API; free tier plus paid plans. |
| SMARD German electricity market API | API for Germany's electricity market data: generation, consumption and prices from the Bundesnetzagentur (documentation in German). |
- Amazon Public Data Sets
- Datasets Subreddit
- Enigma Public
- FiveThirtyEight
- Google Scholar
- Pew Research
- The Upshot by New York Times
- UNData
- Bureau of Justice Statistics
- FBI Crime Statistics
- National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
- Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics
- Drug Data and Database by First Databank
- Drug War Facts
- National Institute on Drug Abuse
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration
- United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
- Academic Rights Press
- BFI Film Forever
- BLS: Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
- IFPI
- Million Song Dataset
- Statista: Film Industry
- Statista: Music Industry
- Statista: Video Game Industry
- The Numbers
- Environmental Protection Agency
- International Energy Agency Atlas
- National Center for Environmental Health
- National Climatic Data Center
- National Weather Service
- Weather Underground
- WeatherBase
- Federal Reserve Economic Database
- Financial Data Finder at OSU - Missing link.
- Global Financial Data
- Google Finance
- Google Public Data Explorer
- IMF Economic Data
- National Bureau of Economic Research
- OpenCorporates
- The Atlas of Economic Complexity
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- UN Comtrade Database
- Visualizing Economics
- World Bank Doing Business Database
- World Bank Open Data
- Data.gov
- European Union Open Data Portal
- Gapminder
- Land Matrix (Transnational Land Database)
- OECD Aid Database
- Open Data Network
- The CIA World Factbook
- The World Bank’s World Development Indicators
- U.S. Census Bureau
- UNDP’s Human Development Index
- America’s Health Rankings
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
- Health & Social Care Information Centre
- Health Services Research Information Central
- HealthData.gov
- Medicare Hospital Quality
- MedicinePlus
- National Center for Health Statistics
- SEER Cancer Incidence
- World Health Organization
- Amnesty International
- Human Rights Data Analysis Group
- The Armed Conflict Database by Uppsala University
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Department of Labor
- Employment by U.S. Census
- U.S. Small Business Administration
- California Field Poll
- Crowdpac
- Gallup
- Open Secrets
- Rand State Statistics
- Real Clear Politics
- Roper Center for Public Opinion Research
- US Voter Files Note only some states are free, and most do not allow voter files to be used for commercial purposes - this map allows you to see the rules/cost for each state.
- Facebook Graph API
- Google Trends
- SocialMention - Missing link.
- Bureau of Transportation Statistics
- Monthly Tourism Statistics – U.S. Travelers Overseas
- Search the World
- SkiftStats
- U.S. Travel Association
- Ckan
- Dataverse
- DBpedia
- freeCodeCamp Open Data
- Kaggle
- LODUM
- Open Data Ipact Map
- Open Data Kit
- Open Data Monitor
- Plenar.io
- UCI Machine Learning Repository
- Yelp Open Datasets
- 100+ of the Best Free Data Sources For Your Next Project
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- 50 Amazing Free Data Sources You Should Know
- 50 Best Open Data Sources Ready to be Used Right Now
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- Big Data: 33 Brilliant And Free Data Sources Anyone Can Use
- These Are The Best Free Open Data Sources Anyone Can Use