Blog de Pierrick Le Gall

My first choice is "How to join the Perl Community" by José Castro aka cog. Cog gives informations about all online community tools. perlmonks.org, podcast... mailing-lists... Then I try to join the Onion room to hear Adrian Howard talk about Ruby in his presentation "Perl eye for the Ruby guy". Unfortunately, the Onion room is full and I can't listen to this talk. The talk slides are available so I take a look at them elsewhere. Ruby seems to be a very interesting tool, much the same as Perl was 10 years ago. I think I'll try this language in a short term.

We have 1 hour and a half to lunch. I join the group of french and we find a cheap restaurant next to the venue.

My afternoon is dedicated to the talk "Advanced Databases for Beginners", by Dave Cross (see photo). As a database design expert Dave give some tips concerning database designs, some kind of "database best practices". For examples:

• store metadata in database, because you can be sure it will eventually be shared among several applications.
• prefer "my_table" than "MyTable" syntax because many DBMS are case insensitive.
• use the same name for the key in every table, eg "id" (so you have album.id, artist.id and track.id)
• don't repeat the table name in the column names (track.track_id is not better than track.id, it doesn't bring more information)
• use parent table name as foreign key column name. "track.album" better than "track.album_id".
• given the last advise, use singular for table names ("track" instead of "tracks")
• strore data and time in the appropriate column type and as UTC. Localtime should just be a display matter.
• when joining tables in a query, use "JOIN" statements and node hiden "WHERE" clause:

SELECT track.id,                         --
       track.name,                       --
       album.name                        -- Bad
  FROM track,                            --
       album                             --
  WHERE album.id = track.album           --
 
SELECT track.id,                         --
       track.name,                       --
       album.name                        -- Good
  FROM track                             --
    JOIN album ON album.id = track.album -- 

And many other things. See Dave's presentation for details. To summarize, I've found Dave's presentation very understandable. Dave speaks indeed slowly and he's loud enough.

The evening I walked in Birmingham to find a shop where I could find an electric plug adapter. I didn't find it but I've walked for at least one hour and a half. At night, I had the feeling that Birmingham city center was mainly collection of recent commercial centers, made of steel and glass.

External Links:

• Day 1 photos by Jon Allen

The YAPC::Europe 2006 report goes on Day 2