Investigating portability of PHP applications developed with MySQL
Posted on Sat 17 September 2005 in PHP
The slides for my php|works 2005 presentation, LIMIT
Yourself to MySQL No
More, are
now online. I'll update this entry once I actually get through talking
through the slides 
Update 2005-09-17
:
The talk went really well, despite my initial fears that I was running over much of the same ground as Lukas Smith's `Database Portability <http://pooteeweet.org/files/phpworks05/fast_portable_SQL.pdf>`__ talk and Wez Furlong's `PHP Data Objects <http://netevil.org/talks/PHP-Data-Objects.pdf>`__ talk. Grounding the material in examples taken from a single, real application in the wild helped make the points more concrete.
Most of the attendees were genuinely interested in exploring the application design choices that accompany designing an application to allow for the possibility of running on multiple databases instead of tightly coupling the application to a single database. Attendees had experience with PostgreSQL, Oracle, and even OpenVMS systems and were able to contribute their own experiences with designing applications for database independence to a discussion that continued after my "official" material had run out. I was happy that it was a very positive session, over all -- there was no mean-spirited "this database sucks, that database rules" jingoism on display.
I did find it quite funny that Daniel Udey, the speaker for the session
before mine, explained to me that he had decided not to attend my
session because he was a self-described MySQL fanatic who was very happy
with MySQL, even though he sometimes had to do torturous things to make
it do what he wanted, and that he didn't want to learn more about how
other databases do things. Heh -- to each their own
After the session, Brian Ashe and Chris Shiflett both gave me some very positive feedback. I hadn't been able to prepare quite as thoroughly as I would have liked, because I have spent the last month getting our house ready to go on the market, so hearing warm words from speakers whom I respect meant a lot to me. Note to self: next time, do not try to sell house in the same week as you are presenting at a conference.
Thanks to Marco for giving me the chance to speak at php|works 2005, and to everyone else (you know who you are) who makes these events so enjoyable and rewarding to attend.