I thoroughly enjoyed the OSCON conference in Portland Oregon last week. As a first time attendee and representing Oracle as a sponsor I was very glad to have been part of this event. Todd Trichler, Chris Jones and myself were expecting to talk about Oracle's ongoing activities around PHP and helping those who are developing systems with PHP and Oracle, but we found ourselves answering questions on a diverse range of Oracle related topics and enjoying many discussions. Thanks to those who dropped by the stand to share their viewpoints on Open Source, Oracle and PHP. I would also like to thank those to dropped by to my session on Oracle's activities and direction with PHP. Thanks for the feedback to those who did so. I also had the pleasure of meeting Wez Furlong for the first time and we chatted about the work he is doing on improvements (more like a partial rewrite) of the PHP OCI8 extension. It will be included in our upcomming Zend Core for Oracle product in collaboration with Zend - look for a beta around the end of August 2005 on the PHP Dev Center at OTN. Wez also did an excellent presentation on PDO which is shaping up well and included in PHP 5.1. Caught up with Andi Gutmans and did some fine-tuning of plans for Zend Core for Oracle and attended his talk on PHP. The open source community is a pleasure to be involved with and I look forward to returning to OSCON next year.

A couple of pics:

















Well, now for Linuxworld in San Francisco...