Today, I gave my first conference presentation ever: You Don't Need a DBA or what every PHP developer should know about database development. Everyone has been extremely supportive throughout the conference and has offered a lot of good tips. I think it went pretty well, but I did forget to make the "all your database are belong to us" joke. When I practiced it, it ran at 56 minutes, but at the conference, it ended up being about 45. Davey from #phpc says that it happens "because you talk faster when you're nervous. You're always nervous." That was definitely true in this case.

I am happy though because from the feedback I received, it does seem that people understand that a solid basis of database skills is important and any developer, PHP or otherwise, is capable to and should have some database tricks under his/her belt.

Afterward, I went to Scalable Doesn't Just Mean Huge–Better PHP with the OCI8 database extension by Christopher Jones which was awesome. The current project I am on does PDO all the time, which is really useful and mainly really really easy. Chris's presentation made me wonder whether I jumped on PDO too fast - OCI8 does so many cool things so nicely, maybe I should've used it all along... I am also definitely going to start using BULK COLLECT more. I can think of at least one bug at work that could be fixed by using it. I guess sometimes you need a conference to shake you out of your small world of one application, look around, and see the wonderful world of possibilities.

Because of an emergency at work, instead of checking out Chris Shiflett's Keynote, I had to get on a conference call. Oh, well, it happens.

One other thing - if, as a PHP developer, you go around saying you really understand how reference variables work, then you're either a. lying or b. Sara Golemon. She presented How PHP Ticks and it was pretty awesome.

Tomorrow should be interesting. I am pretty excited about showing people how to read an EXPLAIN PLAN. I am also going to Christopher Jones' other presentation: Next Generation Database Applications. I am interested in finding out more about connection pooling and I also want to hear what he has to say about the newly released Oracle 11g.

I really wanted to see a presentation by Derick Rethans, but unfortunately he's slotted against me or Christopher Jones. Sorry, Derick!