Alison Holloway's Blog

I've just returned to Melbourne (yes, that's Australia, down the bottom of the world) from New York City, where the very first New York PHP Conference and Expo was held. Chris Jones and I flew over from Australia for it. It's a long way. Really. I'm not a lover of flying, but mostly not a lover of eating bad United Airlines food!

At the NYPHP Conference, I gave a presentation on the new OCI8 PHP driver features that are relevant to PHP developers. I worked with Todd Trichler, another Oracle guy, on the PHPFest, and together we went through installing Oracle, Zend Core for Oracle, and how to use the refactored OCI8 driver in your PHP/Oracle projects.

The talk went down well, and I think we had about 48 people in the room, soaking up information and free beer.

The next day Chris Jones gave his keynote, and Chris did a great job, especially considering he was close to losing his voice due to a throat infection. Nice work Chris!

It was fantastic to meet so many of the PHP and opensource community, and I hope I can get along to next year's conference too. If I met you there, and didn't get your email, please feel free to email me via this blog.

Until next posting ...

After a big week of meeting people, talking and working, I've survived the biggest Oracle conference, ever, Openworld 2006. Over 42,000 people. It was fantastic fun, and I met a lot of customers and other Oracle people. The Melbourne weather followed me to San Francisco and the sun shined every day. Tshirt weather.

Chris Jones and myself did a two hour hands-on-lab on installing and using PHP and Oracle. We got a good attendance of around 60 people, and had good feedback from customers that were pleased Oracle is getting involved with the PHP community and helping to make their lives easier.

Chris and Laksi (from the Oracle OCI team) announced support for database server side connection pooling in an upcoming release of the PHP OCI8 driver. This should help customers manage their Oracle/PHP connections and improve performance and scalability. Stay tuned for more on this.

Of course, this was nothing compared to the announcement of Oracle supporting Linux, Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Yes, full, support of Linux. Larry's keynote was based around this announcement, and the team did an incredible job of keeping this out of the news before-hand, and organising everything on the quiet. The news was simultaneously announced by Larry, and pushed to various web sites. Not to mention banners suddenly appearing in the conference centre.

The other huge event of the conference was the Elton John concert. 30,000 people at a free show, with free beer and food all night.

I have to take my hat off to the conference organisers, and staff involved. It must have been amazingly huge effort to pull it all off. And they did.

I'm now at the Zend conference in San Jose. I'll blog about that soon. I'm doing an install of Oracle Database XE, and Zend Core for Oracle during the OTN night on Wednesday night. If you're at the Zend conference, come along and check out this super easy install and preconfigured Oracle/PHP stack.

The 2007 PHP Quebec Conference is happening in Montreal, Canada on March 14-15-16th 2007 at the Sofitel hotel. They are calling for papers in these areas:

• Advanced Techniques: Providing in-depth analysis of PHP techniques
• Data Availability: Databases, XML, Web Services, VOIP, TOIP, WAP, etc.
• PHP Beyond Theory: Real solutions for real problems related to software development and project management

Closing date is Wednesday, November 29th.

http://conf.phpquebec.com

I'm giving a paper on Working with PHP and Oracle at next week's Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne, Australia. If any of you are there, please come and say hi. I'll be around for most of the conference.

I've just got back from delivering my Working with PHP and Oracle presentation at the Melbourne Opensource Developers' Conference. I don't think the organisers are going to post the presentations, so I wanted to make it available here. This talk covers:

• Free Oracle tools
• OCI8 extension
• Connection management (including the new connection pooling feature)
• Improving performance
• XML
• Oracle resources

The PHP Quebec Conference is happening in Montreal, Canada on 12-14 March 2008. They've put a call out for speakers willing to share their expertise with Canadian and United States PHP professionals.

The Conference features the PHPLab, where speakers and visitors will try to find solutions to actual business problems. The two days of technical talks will be dedicated to advanced software development techniques with PHP5 and PHP6, XML, web services, databases, etc.

Go check it out at http://conf.phpquebec.com