Announcing My Webinar on December 14th: What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications

It's time to do something a little different and for me that doesn't mean cutting off my hair and joining a monastery, nor does it mean buying a cherry red convertible (yet), it means doing a webinar!

• On December 14th, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EST, I'll be hosting What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications.
• The webinar is sponsored by VoltDB, but it will be completely vendor independent, as that's the only honor preserving and technically accurate way of doing these things.
• The webinar will run about 60 minutes, with 40 minutes of speechifying and 20 minutes for questions.
• The hashtag for the event on Twitter will be SQLNoSQL. I'll be monitoring that hashtag if you have any suggestions for the webinar or if you would like to ask questions during the webinar.

The motivation for me to do the webinar was a talk I had with another audience member at the NoSQL Evening in Palo Alto. He said he came from a Java background and was confused about the future. His crystal ball wasn't working anymore. Should he invest more time on Java? Should he learn some variant of NoSQL? Should he focus on one of the many other alternative databases? Or do what exactly?

He was exasperated at the bewildering number of database options out there today and asked my opinion on what he should do. I get that question a lot. And 30 seconds before the next session starting was not enough time for a real answer. So I hope to give the answer that I wanted to give then, here, in this webinar.

We've all probably had that helpless feeling of facing a massive list of strangely named databases, each matched against a list of a dozen cryptic sounding features, wondering how the heck we should make a decision? In the past there was a standard set of options. A few popular relational databases ruled and your job as a programmer was to force the square peg of your problem into the round hole of the relational database.

Then a few intrepid souls, like LiveJournal and Google, went off script and paved their own way, building specialized systems that solved their own specific problems. Over time those systems have generalized into the abundance we have today. It's as Mae West, seductive siren of the silver screen, once said "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!"

We are in a time of great change, creativity, and opportunity. It's a little confusing, sure, but it's also a cool time, an optimistic time. We can now work together to solve problems faster, better, and in larger numbers than ever before. We can now build something new and different and it's faster, easier, and cheaper than ever before. The question is, where to start?

In this webinar what I hope to do is help you figure out how to answer the "What should I do" question for yourself, like what I try to do in my blog, only more conversational. We'll take a use case approach. I promise we won't spend 20 minutes on CAP or other eyes-glazing-over topics. We'll try to look at what you need to do and use your requirements to figure out which product, or more likely, set of products to use.

That's the plan. I really hope you can attend. If you like this blog I think you'll like the webinar too. And if you have a friend or coworker you think could benefit from the webinar please forward them this link.

This is my first webinar, so if you have any advice on how not to suck please comment here, email me directly, or use the SQLNoSQL hashtag and I'll see it. I'd appreciate the advice. If you have suggestions about what you would like me to talk about or what you think the right answer is, please let me know that too. All inputs welcome.

thanks