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.
