Online Databases

Individual Databases

• Counting California - Information on "Agriculture and Natural Resources;  Banking, Finance and Insurance;  Business and Industry;  Crime, Law Enforcement & Criminal Justice;  Education;  Elections;  Energy and Public Utilities;  Health and Vital Statistics;  Housing Characteristics and Costs;  Income, Poverty, and Cost of Living;  Land, Water and Climate;  Population and Demographics;  Public Finance, Government & Taxes;  Social Services and Public Assistance;  Transportation; and  Work, Labor, and Employment"
  Excel files & PDFs.

• USDA PLANTS Database - The PLANTS Database provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories. It includes names, plant symbols, checklists, distributional data, species abstracts, characteristics, images, plant links, references, crop information, and automated tools.
  Displays tables in response to html form queries, downloadable as CSV

• United Nations Statistics Division - Global social and economic data. High level categories are Demographic & Social, Energy, Environment, Industry, National Accounts, and Trade.
  HTML tables displayed, downloadable as CSV

• UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Site - This site contains the reference sequence for the human and C. elegans genomes and working drafts for the mouse, rat, Fugu, Drosophila, C. briggsae, and SARS genomes. It also contains the CFTR (cystic fibrosis) region in 13 species.
  various standard bioinformatics sequence ASCII formats

• Baseball Statistics - The Lahman baseball database, 1871-present. Table titles are MASTER, Batting, Pitching, Fielding, All-Star, Hall of Fame, Managers, Teams, BattingPost, PitchingPost, TeamFranchises, FieldingOF, ManagersHalf, TeamsHalf, Salaries, SeriesPost, AwardsManagers, AwardsPlayers, AwardsShareManagers, and AwardsSharePlayers.
  ms access, CSV

• Bureau of Labor Statistics - From the Department of Labor. If you search for the phrase Excel, or look for "Download 2002 Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates in Zipped Excel files", there are some large data sets of occupation by city/region/state, and so on.
  Excel

• Human Mortality Database - The Human Mortality Database (HMD) was created to provide detailed mortality and population data to researchers, students, journalists, policy analysts, and others interested in the history of human longevity.
  registration required (free), tab-delimited text

Database Collections

• NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) Scientific and Technical Databases - Lots of data. High-level catergories are: Analytical Chemistry; Atomic and Molecular Physics; Biometrics; Biotechnology; Chemical and Crystal Structure; Chemical Kinetics; Chemistry; Communications; Construction; Environmental Data; Fire; Fluids; International Trade Law Enforcement; Materials Properties; Mathematical Databases, Software and Tools; Optical Character Recognition; Physics; Product Design; Surface Data; Text and Video Retrieval; Thermophysical and Thermochemical.
  

• Statistical Science Data Sets - Large index of data sets from fully processed to raw, including the Breakfast Cereal Data Set.

• LexisNexis Statistical Universe - Just about everything. Be sure to check the box that says "Limit to Documents with Excel Spreadsheets".
  GIF tables, excel files, only works from Stanford campus

• The Journalists Database of Databases - A good collection of interesting data, mostly government, social, and economic.
  excel, access, ascii tables, html tables

• Fathom Data Sets - Various nice data sets meant for use with the vis program fathom.
  mostly tabular html and ascii