Believe it or not, YouTube.com isn’t just a site full of America’s funniest home videos or the latest music videos off MTV. YouTube also has a pretty wide collection of technology videos including many SQL Server videos—some by SQL Server Magazine authors and Microsoft executives. So the next time your boss catches you on YouTube, you can legitimately claim that you were researching a tech problem. To back up that claim, here are my seven favorite SQL Server videos from YouTube.
SQL Server Backup Types Explained
In this short five-minute video from LearnSqlServerDotCom, you’ll get a concise novice-level introduction to SQL Server backups. This video illustrates how to perform full backups, differential backups, and transaction log backups: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlDdrl5s2V4.
JOINs and UNIONs - How Do I Know When to Use a JOIN or UNION
This seven-minute video by LearnSqlServerDotCom provides a good beginning-level discussion of the differences between joins and unions. You’ll learn the best places to use each of these techniques: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I9hXBETtFA.
SQL Server Disk Optimization
In this hour-long video from Quest Software, Kevin Kline, my fellow SQL Server Magazine columnist, dives into performance tuning SQL Server 2005’s disk and I/O access. He covers important performance monitor counters and how to interpret these counters: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cg5Ep99kq_k.
Maximize SQL Server Performance with SQL Tuning
Another hour-long performance-tuning video from Quest Software—Claudia Fernandez covers tuning the SQL statements that your applications use and shows how to use SET STATISTICS and SET SHOW PLAN. The video also covers some of the SQL Server tuning tools: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoOUdZVsacE.
Business Intelligence Demonstration
If you’re looking for a practical case study of how business intelligence is used to extract meaningful decisionmaking information from relational database systems, you might want to check out this half-hour video from Oakwood. It shows how the Tennessee court system uses SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services: www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j5J7lXav7Y&feature=related.
SQL Server 2008 & the Data Explosion
In this four-minute video from TechEd, Francois Ajenstat, director of product management, SQL Server, explains the transition of SQL Server 2008 from a relational database to an enterprise data platform. Francois also discusses some of the outstanding new features in the upcoming SQL Server 2008 release: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECd3549soI.
Life of Simon, SQL Server DBA
How can you go to YouTube without finding something entertaining? This video from Idera provides a humorous look at the trying life of a DBA. While there isn’t much technical content here, you’ll definitely get a kick out of parts of it: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IN5Xbt_vks.