We have been running an experiment for the past few months: if we host a weekly online webinar, will anyone show up?

We – the Database Developer Tools team, mostly – want to try different things, find different ways to reach new developers and make Oracle Database as approachable as possible.

For example, this week Product Manager Melli Annamalai – she is a BIG DATA expert, so don’t miss this one!!! – will be doing a talk on loading Hadoop data to Oracle Database.

Each week’s session is recorded and posted to YouTube. Here’s the playlist:

Some tweaks?

I’d like to lean towards shorter sessions. Getting and KEEPING someone’s attention for more than 30 minutes can be a huge challenge, if not even impossible.

But then going too short might make it harder for people to commit to watching and participating ‘live.’ Or maybe we should just record and produce straight to YouTube – but then you don’t get a chance to actually communicate ‘live’ with the presenter.

What say you? Does this provide any value? If so, what topics would you like to see covered going forward?

You can find the location of this in the ad to the right, and I have it linked in the first sentence of this post…

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I'm a Distinguished Product Manager at Oracle. My mission is to help you and your company be more efficient with our database tools.

4 Comments

  1. I don’t mind the 60 minutes but shorter is also great (because I am short, short people rock!)

    I also like the live sessions and then the post on YouTube. It gives the feel of real people in a high tech world.

    Keep up the good work, say I.

    • Several studies have shown attention spans deteriorate after about 20 mins, so I would say that should be your target. Having two 20-minute sessions that could be viewed separately (as time permits) would be preferable to a lengthier 40-minute session.

  2. Terry McCasland Reply

    Hi Jeff, i like the idea of shorter…20 or 30 min…. and posting it on your site

  3. Yaniv Harpaz Reply

    I think it’s a great idea!!
    I would love it.

    I live in Israel, so it’s 10 hours away from California’s time. i think offline discussions should be very useful (on the video’s comments during the next few days after the publication on youTube).

    Subjects I’d like to watch:
    1. SQL Developer session on working with Hive on hadoop / Cloudera machines.
    2. Using SQL Developer and sqoop with importing data from Oracle to hadoop.
    3. What options do we have using Flume (as some sort of a queuing component) ?!

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