As I write this, I am flying back to Chicago now, 9 PM Oct 21, from Mexico City, after a very nice two day visit.

 

Quest Mexico asked me to come down to help celebrate the release of Toad Version 10. I said "OK."

 

And, wow, they did a really fantastic job of making me feel appreciated. Besides putting me up in a fabulous, old but very excellent hotel, El Camino Real Polenco, and making sure I enjoyed outstanding meals of (surprise) Mexican cuisine, they pulled together an enormous gathering of over 250 Oracle technologists for an evening presentation at the beautiful http://www.haciendadelosmorales.com/index.php by Claudia Fernandez, Quest product manager supreme, to talk about Toad 10, and me to talk about, well, pretty much whatever I felt like talking about, which turned out to be the function result cache feature of Oracle11g.

 

Quest Mexico also ordered 100 of my Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices books to give away to the first 100 people who arrived on the 20th. That turned out to be a fine motivator. Developers started arriving at 2 PM or so for a 5 PM start time. Unfortunately, due to problems with Customs in Mexico, we didn't have those orange books. Fortunately, we had a nice big pile of a book that Claudia co-authored, Database Benchmarking. So attendees received those. And then they lined up for autographs. As I signed books, I got to meet a lot of very enthusiastic PL/SQL developers - several of which said that they benefited greatly from my writing. How satisfying!

 

On the wall behind our signing table was a banner with a reproduction of my head that must have been five feet high. I kid you not - in fact, you can see it here. Fortunately, I am a humble fellow, so I only posed in front of the banner for a few photos.

Many attendees also asked to have their photo taken with me. And Ricardo of Quest was kind enough to use my camera to also capture those moments. You can view all those photos here.

 

I must tell you that years ago, when people first asked for autographs, asked to have their picture taken with me, I was a little bit embarrassed by the whole situation. C'mon, I just wrote a few (well, 10) books about this one language, PL/SQL. Why are they getting so excited? They are being weird, ridiculous. But I eventually came to realize that it really doesn't matter what I think. What matters is that for whatever reason (I have some idea of why this happened, but it is still a bit of a mystery to me) my books, my writings, my trainings have had a substantial impact on the lives of these developers. My ideas and my ways of expressing them have improved their lives.

 

Now, that realization is/was a continually humbling experience. Now, I am honored that anyone would care to have me sign their book or share a photo with them. And I have decided to start celebrating this honor and, at least this is my intention, honor my readers by posting on Flickr the photos we took together (and others from the event in La Hacienda Morales in Mexico City).

 

 

Many thanks to Diana, Belen, Daniel, Pablo, Ricardo and others at Quest Mexico for organizing a fantastic set of events (beyond just the public program), media interviews and overall stay. I look forward to a triumphant return, or perhaps a visit to Monterey.

 

Once again, I find myself marveling at my good fortune and the fine life I have. I only wish I was able to spend time with all my PL/SQL friends around the world and not be away from wife, Veva, and my boys. That is a substantial price to pay. Sigh....

 

Finally, I very much enjoyed having an opportunity to resurrect my rusty (not) command of the Spanish language. I am not sure whether it is a blessing or a curse, but they tell me that I am able to pronounce words in Spanish very well (roll those r's, put the accent on the correct syllable, etc.). This leads native speakers to believe that I can speak and understand much more than I actually can. So I start out strong, but immediately stumble over a serious lack of vocabulary, and very poor comprehension (I can talk better than I can understand - big surprise, I spend so much of my life talking at others).