The short answer is no. I've searched long and hard, high and low, for free (beer) horse racing databases for UK/IRE and Australia. To a lesser extent I've searched for HK, FR and GER data. I'm yet to find anything that is comprehensive and no cost.
There's a couple that I do use for UK/IRE racing which cost in the region of £35-£45 per month for access. Betwise/Smartform provides an historical database in MySQL, and daily race card/results updates. UKHorseRacing.co.uk provides CVS files with historical race data, their ratings and race results. I take these CVS files, combine them into a SQLite database and interrogate with R.
A slightly longer answer is, sort of. The Betfair API is currently open access for non-commercial and low volume use (as far as I'm aware). This will allow you to retrieve basic racing data - the cards before that race with horse name, jockey, barrier etc and the race results post-race including the Betfair Starting Price. After interrogating the API, you'll need to obviously compile the data into your own database. A bit of work, but feasible. Betfair has a developer programme and their are API bindings available in a number of different languages. I use R (R package developed by Betwise mentioned above), but I know Python is available. One caveat to mention is that Betfair are upgrading their API, so this will obviously have an impact on existing programs using the old one.
If anyone else has additional information or could point me in the direction of something else "free" I'd appreciate it as well.
