Maine Pics

Joseph and I went to Maine. It is really stunning up there.

http://fusion.sas.upenn.edu/~robertom/vacation/maine/

PHP and Oracle cursors

Just checking back in accessing Oracle cursors within PHP. I thought you might be able to retrieve complex data objects using cursors (instead of XML) but that doesn't appear to be the case. When you a retrieve an Oracle cursor, it brings back a resource. You still need to loop over it to fetch the data. This is still better than multiple queries, and perhaps more straightforward than the XML queries. Still I like the XML method better.

PHP and Oracle Talk

Here's my talk on using PHP and Oracle.

Pics and Vids

The first version of the skiing pics and videos are up.

I need an exciting sound track for the videos since right now they just have my nervous laughs and yelps as I try to keep from wiping out while filming. Great fun though.

Oracle and PHP Workshop

I went to Chris Jones' workshop this morning at the PHP Quebec conference and picked up a few nice tidbits. The OCI interface supports passing arrays to pl/sql procedures and functions. You just bind the array variable like any other variable. In another example, he was creating XML through a query and the SELECT had an interesting feature:

SELECT field, CURSOR(SELECT bla FROM bla) etc.

It looks like you can retrieve variable array type data in your query. He also demonstrated the performance benefits using oci_set_prefetch().

First Day of Skiing

I survived the first day of skiing. Joseph, Morgan (mysql tech support) and I stuck together and stayed on the easy slopes. We are all about the same level so this worked out really well. Heading down one green trail, we saw the "Enchanted Forest" with inviting wood cut outs. We couldn't resist and were soon among the trees and and the large cutout illustrations. Apparantly though, "Enchanted Forest" must mean "Colorful Death Trap" in French. Large moguls, very tight turns and lots of "enchanted" trees getting in your way. I prayed to Sony Bono. We finally abandoned that "green" trail to get back to the main trail we originally were on. The one nice thing about it though was that it really forced the skills to come back quickly. The original trail was now a piece of cake.

Tonight we are having dinner with the PHP Quebec user's group in Quebec city. I'm pretty beat so I'll be happy if I can keep my eyes open and avoid drooling if do happen to fall asleep.

PHP Conference in Montreal

I'll be presenting at the Conference PHP Quebec on Friday, March 16th. For full details see:

http://conf.phpquebec.com/en/conf2007/

I'll be speaking on how to take advantage of some of Oracle's features in PHP. The only Oracle/PHP talks that I've been to discuss the basics of talking to Oracle from PHP. I hope to give people some ideas on how to better use their database layer to reduce the amount of work they have to do in PHP.

The conference organizers have put together a pre-conference ski trip for some of the speakers. I'm going and bringing my boyfriend Joseph along with me. Neither of us has much experience skiing. If I'm still walking at the end of the ski trip, I'll consider it a success.

First post!

Okay, I finally came up with a name for this blog which wasn't already taken. Its pretty funny to see that 99% of your creative thoughts and wordplays on "blog" have already happened in other people's minds -- most several years ago. I guess that's what I get for jumping on the blog bandwagon so very late in the game.