Moin Moin,

after two weeks holiday and nearly totally offline I found myself back in the office to setup my new MAC Mini. Yeah! I must say - MAC OS X is definitely the best OS I ever used. Even if there’s not really a need for, one of the first software I installed was Parallels to have a Debian Linux available. For me, this is actually the perfect working place. Just imagine how much software and tools you have in one really small machine. This is really inspiring and helpful to make a good job each day.

But now some words to the topic of this post. I will attend at this years PHP Unconference here in Hamburg Rock City. The PHP Unconference will be held in the “Geomatikum” at Bundesstraße 55. It’s part of the University of Hamburg. Over 200 visitors are registered and a lot of cool topics will be discussed.

The idea behind the Unconference is quite charming because “Un” means “self organized”. This means the schedule will be established during the introduction at Saturday. Everybody will get an amount of “points” which he can use to vote for the talks submitted by the attendees. This year it’s also possible to contribute a topic (or more) at the website. There, it’s also possible to vote for a topic in advance of the conference.

My contribution is a talk about the fulltext search of the PostgreSQL. Actually there are not that big amount of votes yet (exactly two ;-) - one is mine, but don’t tell anyone). But hey, how sould I compete against excellent Kore Nordmanns talk about PHPillow or Sebastian Bergmanns talks about scalability of PHP and PHPUnit or Arne Blankerts talk about security in PHP (yes for sure I will attend to these talks and I am really looking forward ;-) ).

The topics of my talk are:

- how does full text search work in PostgreSQL
- which dictionary’s are available and how do you create them
- configuring the full text search
- which functions are available for the full text search
- how to index data (by hand, with a user defined function, with trigger procedures)
- how to create a search query

I will show this in psql and with a small PHP application. Well - I hope that I have enough time till Saturday to create the slides and the small app ;-).

See you Saturday or Sunday?