diislab/dbs2-omdb repository overview

⁠DBS2 OMDB – PostgreSQL Sample Database

This image provides a ready-to-use PostgreSQL 18.6 database containing the Open Media Database (OMDB) for teaching, SQL practice, and database experiments.

It is maintained by the DIIS Lab at Hochschule Düsseldorf and is primarily used in the module Datenbanksysteme 2.

⁠What is OMDB?

OMDB (Open Media Database) is a freely available database containing information about movies, series, people, casts, categories, languages, countries, and related data.

The data originates from omdb.org and is imported into a normalized PostgreSQL schema based on the credativ/omdb-postgresql project.

The schema is intentionally only minimally optimized. Apart from primary keys, it contains no extensive set of indexes. This makes the database particularly useful for:

• refreshing and practicing SQL,
• exploring a realistic relational schema,
• joins and aggregation queries,
• query analysis,
• indexing and query optimization experiments.

This image is intended as a convenient teaching and experimentation environment. No manual OMDB download or import is required.

⁠Supported platforms

The image is published as a multi-platform image for:

• linux/amd64
• linux/arm64

It can therefore be used on common Linux and Windows systems as well as Intel and Apple Silicon Macs running Docker.

⁠Available tags

⁠2026.1-pg18.6

Recommended tag for teaching environments.

It identifies both the OMDB teaching snapshot and the PostgreSQL version used by the image.

⁠2026.1

Convenience alias for the current 2026.1 teaching snapshot.

For reproducible teaching environments, using the full version tag is recommended:

diislab/dbs2-omdb:2026.1-pg18.6

⁠Quick start with Docker

Run the database with:

docker run -d \
  --name dbs2-omdb \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=omdb \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=omdb \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=omdb \
  -p 127.0.0.1:54329:5432 \
  -v dbs2_omdb_pg18:/var/lib/postgresql \
  diislab/dbs2-omdb:2026.1-pg18.6

The OMDB snapshot is restored automatically when the database volume is initialized for the first time.

⁠Connection settings

After the container has started, connect using:

These credentials are intentionally simple because this image is designed for local teaching and experimentation.

Do not use these credentials for production systems or expose this container directly to untrusted networks.

⁠Docker Compose

For teaching, Docker Compose is the recommended way to start the database.

Example compose.yaml:

name: dbs2-omdb

services:
  postgres:
    image: diislab/dbs2-omdb:2026.1-pg18.6
    container_name: dbs2-omdb

    environment:
      POSTGRES_DB: omdb
      POSTGRES_USER: omdb
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: omdb

    ports:
      - "127.0.0.1:54329:5432"

    healthcheck:
      test:
        [
          "CMD-SHELL",
          "pg_isready -U omdb -d omdb && test -f \"$$PGDATA/.dbs2-omdb-ready\""
        ]
      interval: 5s
      timeout: 5s
      retries: 60

    volumes:
      - dbs2_omdb_pg18:/var/lib/postgresql

volumes:
  dbs2_omdb_pg18:
    name: dbs2_omdb_pg18

Start the database with:

docker compose up -d

Check its status with:

docker compose ps

Stop the container while keeping the database volume:

docker compose down

⁠Resetting the database

To return to a clean OMDB snapshot, remove the container and its volume:

docker compose down -v
docker compose up -d

The database will then be initialized again from the snapshot included in the image.

⁠Example queries

Count all movies:

SELECT COUNT(*)
FROM movies;

Inspect some entries:

SELECT id, name, date, runtime
FROM movies
WHERE kind = 'movie'
ORDER BY date DESC NULLS LAST
LIMIT 10;

Explore the provided cast view:

SELECT *
FROM casts_view
LIMIT 10;

The database can be accessed with any PostgreSQL-compatible client, such as psql, DBeaver, DataGrip, or pgAdmin.

⁠Teaching use

Within Datenbanksysteme 2, this image is mainly used as a lightweight SQL practice and reference database.

Students can use it to revisit concepts from introductory database courses (e.g. Datenbanksysteme 1) before working with larger and other specific databases used throughout later parts of the module.

The OMDB dataset may also be used occasionally for demonstrations where a compact relational dataset is more convenient than other complex examples.

⁠Data source and attribution

The OMDB data originates from omdb.org (Open Media Database).

The PostgreSQL schema and import procedure are based on the open-source project credativ/omdb-postgresql.

According to the upstream project, the textual OMDB data is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Germany (CC BY 2.0 DE) license.

The credativ/omdb-postgresql import tooling is independently developed by credativ and licensed under GNU GPL v2 or later.

This container image packages a PostgreSQL database snapshot generated from those sources for teaching purposes.

⁠Maintainer

DIIS Lab
Hochschule Düsseldorf – University of Applied Sciences