I’ll be speaking at OSCON 2008 in Portland, delivering my Normalization Session. More details as I get them.

I’ve had one session accepted at the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo (which is a good thing since I only submitted one session for nomination).

This year’s session is titled How to be Normal, a Guide for Developers. I decided to return to my old Normalization talk, but lean more towards the practical than the theoretical this year and work on common scenarios faced by developers rather than walk a person through the normal forms like I have previously done.

Here’s the abstract I’ll be sending in to replace the ugly one I submitted with:

At some point in every software project involving a database it becomes necessary for the developers who created (or inherited) the project to step back and take a look at their database. Many projects have a database schema that has evolved over time, with columns added here and tables added …