php|works '07
Just submitted proposals for talks to the php|works '07 conference. Yes, they're pretty database heavy; maybe it's kind of cheating to submit Oracle-related talks to a PHP conference, but maybe it's not. The first proposal is "i18n with PHP and Oracle". What to look for, what you should think about when designing a world wide web system, and wild wild west of character sets. Using PDO_OCI based code for examples. The other two talks are meant to be educational if you're interested to learn more about databases, how they work and how they're really important to every developer. The first talk is mainly about coding standards for database development, basic knowledge you should have about indexing, optimizing and designing objects to preserve referential integrity. The second focuses on optimizing queries. How to read an explain plan, what the heck is a skip index, why it's important to know the purpose of your query and other common techniques. This is not to say that I have found the final solution for optimizing all queries nor do I mean to imply that it's easy. Tom Kyte has said many times that if optimizing queries were so easy, we'd just have written a program to do it long time ago. Personally I find optimizing queries very fulfilling. I think the combination of anticipation ("what kind of data should I expect?"), pressure ("this needs to return data in less than 0.002 seconds!") and eventual results ("hey, we went from 2947 consistent gets to under 15!") is very satisfying. There are a lot of factors to consider and many solutions. A lot of good decisions in optimizing queries come with experience of doing so - maybe it's really the possibility of things going totally crazy that I find so appealing?
Comments (0)