After spending a good week at my parents in rainy but relaxing florida, I flew to Toronto to speak at php|works. The conference was great fun and especially my second talk Explaing Explain went as good as I had hoped. In the talk I was mostly talking about controlling execution plans with particular focus on MySQL and PostgreSQL. I spend longer than ever on this talk so I am happy it worked out so well. I will probably submit the same talk for OSDBcon with some minor tweaks. Since I only had 60 minutes several slides are marked "skip". Maybe OSDBcon can give me two slots so that I can cover those slides as well. The other talk building portable database applications suffered a bit from my magalomaniac attempt at giving the gist of 3 talks in one slot. Sorry that we did not have any time for Q&A as a result.

I flew more or less directly from Toronto back to the frisbee pitches of Berlin. Unfortunately my flight had a 2.5 hour delay coming out of New York so I missed the first game. Which is even more embarassing considering that I was team captain at a tournament where all players are mixed at random by skill level. In frisbee jargon that is called a "hat tournament". So the job of the captain is to make sure that all of these people that do not know eachother and that play at different levels find to eachother. But my team won even without me. Actually we won all but 1 game, so we placed 5th of 16 teams. But more importantly I got to meet and play with 10 people I did not previously know all weekend! Anyways next wednesday I am off to Viareggio Italy to play some beach ultimate frisbee.

From one who was there...they were great talks, especially the one on EXPLAIN (though I'd characterize it more as explaining execution plans rather than EXPLAIN). Thanks!

--Julian

Yeah, I originally planned to talk about EXPLAIN output only, but found that this would have been a rather boring talk. Glad that you enjoyed the talks!