This paper documents the public release PR08 of the International Tokamak Physics Activity (ITPA) profile database, which should be of particular interest to the magnetic confinement fusion community. Data from a wide variety of interesting discharges from many of the world's leading tokamak experiments are now made available in PR08, which also includes predictive simulations of an initial set of operating scenarios for ITER. In this paper we describe the discharges that have been included and the tools that are available to the reader who is interested in accessing and working with the data. Most discharge descriptions refer to more detailed previous publications. In addition, we review physics analyses that have already made use of the profile database discharges. Public access to PR08 data is unconditional, but this paper should be cited by any publication that makes use of PR08 data.