Laying Low for Awhile

At the end of php/db|works I had planned to post a little write up about the conference, but ended up getting pulled in a number of directions so I let it slide a bit. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy myself, I actually thought the conference was run really well and I enjoyed getting to meet a bunch of new people. The problem was that in the midst of my having a good experience with the php community, there was this on-line furor being raised over [http://talks.php.net/show/oscon06/3 Rasmus’ talk] mentioning postgresql performance. From emails to [http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/1412249 slashdot] and even on irc, it seemed everywhere I went people were rasing a fuss over something that was completely mis-characterized… the dang thing even ended up on [http://www.pythian.com//blogs/246/log-buffer-10-a-carnival-of-the-vanities-for-dbas log buffer] for goodness sake. Having sat through the talk and sat through dinner with Rasmus that night, I really didn’t get any impression that he was making any kind of claims or attacks against postgresql, he was merely showing a series of steps he took to increase performance of a (admittedly simplified) database backed web application, all from an open, technical stand-point. (I encourage anyone interested to check out the slides, and would encourage people even more to reproduce the results with either better postgresql tuning, or possibly with a more realy world app, like [http://www.s9y.org/ s9y]) The problem is that people didn’t want to hear this, so when I spoke up about it, I ended up being drawn into discussions where I was stepping on peoples religious orientation when I only wanted to set the record straight. Quite frankly that type of thing drains on you (or at least drains on me), so I’ve kind of been laying low a bit, collecting my thoughts and working on some things not as on the radar (at least not yet). There will be more to come I am sure, but since a few people had asked me about it, I just thought I would drop a note to say that yes, I am still here.