I attended the Advanced Perl DBI tutorial mostly because I chose to follow
the Perl track and partly because no other tutorial jumped out at me as a
must-see. The fun thing about having a notebook computer with wireless
network access during a geek convention is the ability to chat on IRC with
other people in the same or other sessions. Incidently, drop by #oscon on
Freenode or irc.perl.org and say hello; my handle is sirhc. These chatty
people can tell me about other sessions and what I'm missing. Apparently,
of the only two other tutorials I would have considered attending, the
Haskell tutorial is interesting, while the web services tutorial isn't.
Tim Bunce, the author of DBI, is a pretty charismatic guy. He presents
well and is quite interesting and clear. However, he mostly reads from
his copious slides. That's not necessarily bad, as his slides are dense
with useful information. It does free me up from taking notes (and allows
me to write journal entries instead).
In my former life as a Web developer, I did a lot of work with MySQL and
spent a lot of time optimizing for speed. In my current life as a
sysadmin programmer, I don't use DBI very much.
Sometimes, however, it's about quality not quantity. There were a few
gems, some DBI best practices, that I will find incredibly useful as I
push the use of databases at work.
For that reason alone, I found this tutorial useful and worth my time.
