Well, I'm not sure, but the presentation went moderately well. Unlike my last presentation which I had to throw together at the last minute, I actually had time to prepare for this one. As it turns out, a large portion of my audience had not used databases, so much of what I put together was lost on them. I don't think there was any way of communicating SQL management strategies to people who didn't know what a SELECT statement was. Fortunately, I made sure to throw in lots of interesting pictures so they still had something to look at.
Jeff Zucker and Randal Schwartz both commented that they thought the info was good, but I think I still need more practice, so I'll start working on another one. I think that Logic Programming in Perl might be interesting, though I can see people's eyes glazing over at that one, too. In any event, the CPAN has what appears to be a nice SWI Prolog interface that I can use. I'll just need to come up with some real world examples. Who's going to care about the N-Queens problem? Maybe picking airline routes or something. Suggestions welcome.
Things I learned ...
And finally: the weirdest coincidence.
The seeds of this talk were planted over a year ago when I attended a Ward Cunningham talk about Extreme Programming. In the talk, I asked how he handled rapid database development and the need to refactor the database along with the code. It's all too easy to create a denormalized database so I was thinking that the entire data model would need to be created up front. While I don't remember his answer, I left with a lot of questions and my talk last night was my answer to those questions. The coincidence lies in the fact that I was the opening act and the headliner was none other than Ward Cunningham with Brian Ingerson. I didn't know this prior to volunteering the presentation, so I was astonished.
