Pramod Sadalage is one of the leading innovators of evolutionary database design.

Our profession seems to be constantly hampered by the communication barriers we erect for ourselves. For enterprise systems one of the most annoying barriers is the one between application developers and database people. Although much of my early years involved databases and data modeling, my involvement with object-orientation cast me firmly into the application development side. As a consequence I haven't spent much time talking to people from the database community.

On January 9 I get a rare opportunity to fix that as I'll be speaking at my local chapter of DAMA with my colleague Pramod Sadalage. Pramod played a central role in the development of evolutionary database design techniques in ThoughtWorks as a DBA who closely works with development teams. His also written valuable books on Refactoring Databases and Continuous Database Integration. So, as you might have gathered, he knows all the material backwards and I'm glad to be invited along for the ride.

We'll be talking about database refactoring and techniques for evolutionary database design. It will be interesting to see how this talk is received. I'm told that these topics are still seen as highly controversial in many parts of the data community, yet these are techniques that are so usual for ThoughtWorks that they are just part of the furniture of our development projects.

Looking further out - I'll be appearing in London again for QCon. I'll update this page later with more details about what I'll be doing there.