Vitor Rodrigues

After my yesterdays participation in the workshop DB2 XML – A True XML and Relational Database, the rest of the week will be spent at the CASCON Technology Showcase, with a poster and a some live demos aout DB2 9 pureXML™.

Yesterday’s workshop as a success! The room was completely full and we even had some people having lunch in the meeting room just to have more time to explore the project and ask us questions. My session was the first in the afternoon, entitled "XML Indexing in DB2", with a 30 minute presentation plus 40 minutes of lab exercises. As my first experience lecturing at a workshop, it was interesting to be on the other side and feel the responsability (and excitment) of having about 40 people staring at us and asking questions. Most of the public in our workshop were wither DB Appllication developers or students in the database field.

Note 1: for as much that you prepare a presentation, there will be always some question that you don’t expect, and that if have no idea what’s the correct answer.

Note 2: for as much that you prepare the lab exercises, there will always be a typo on it Nothing serious.. just a "$d" not escaped being consumed by the linux command line.

Note 3: the food at Hilton is great!

Popularity: 7% [?]

12 hours of flight can be transformed into 32 hours of travelling, if you have to "visit" 4 airports and one of the flights gets delayed, making you spend the night at the airport waiting for a connection flight. The (not!) awesome United Airlines declined to pay for a hotel room for the about 50 people with lost connections, because, according to them, the delay "was in the taxi way, so it’s not our fault". Well, for some reason that wasn’t explained, the airplane left the gate in direction to the taxi way almost one hour late. Considering that my connection was 15 minutes after our arrival to Washingotn Dulles Airport, that hour would have been enough for me!

After leaving Carapeços (Barcelos, Portugal) at 8:00h of September 25, I just arrived Toronto (Canada) at 11h30 of September 26.

I’ll be in the Toronto area for one year, enjoying the freezing weather of Canada, and also enjoying my work at IBM Canada, working as a technology enabler for DB2 9 pureXML™.

1st impressions:

• traffic is hell! Even worse than Los Angeles.
• The streets/houses are old and not taken care off.
• the IBM lab is just beautifull, and with excellent conditions.
• I need to get a network cable, because the wireless signal in my office is very weak…

Popularity: 17% [?]

CASCON 2006 wil take place from October 16 to October 19, in Toronto, Canada. 

"CASCON 2006 is the 16th in the Annual International Conference hosted
by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies. This "Meeting of Minds"
provides an exciting forum for exchanging ideas and experiences in the
ever-expanding and critical fields of software development and
computing."

I will be presenting at CASCON, doing both a workshop and a technology showcase. Both sessions will be about the same subject: DB2 9 and it’s pureXML™ features.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Popularity: 22% [?]