Movie ratings, in one paragraph

movie-ratings in one paragraph, for anyone deciding whether it is worth downloading.

9,000 rows, 7 columns, one row per user-film rating. Nine thousand user ratings over 260 films, with genres, release years, and the long-tail popularity distribution that makes naive recommenders look better than they are.

Every dataset here is synthetic, which is a deliberate trade. It costs realism and buys three things: we can ship it CC0 with no licence trap, we can bake in the exact quirk a lesson needs, and nobody's real records end up in a tutorial.

Something to try: Build a top-rated list, notice it is nonsense, then add Bayesian shrinkage. The SQL playground has it loaded already, and the data explorer will profile every column in one pass if you would rather look before you query.

select *
from movie_ratings
limit 20;

The file is generated from a fixed seed, so the CSV you download today is byte-identical to the one from last year. That matters more than it sounds: it means a lesson can say "row 412 is the interesting one" and still be right in eighteen months.

Download it, break it, keep it. CC0 — no attribution required, no account, no email.