Dbforum 2006, in the past...

The database forum just finished.  I am back in Malov Denmark - outside of Copenhagen - for the night to await my flight back home.  The database forum was a neat event.  I was a track leader - meaning I actually had some ongoing responsibilities during the conference.  But that also meant I got to attend all of the sessions in my track, something I don't always get to do.

So, what will I miss about the dbforum?  Not this guy, one Doug Burns:

He looks friendly enough, but looks can be deceiving :)  All of these guys - definitely.  I got to meet and "re-meet" a lot of people.  I recognized some people from prior seminars and got to meet lots of new people I hadn't before:

I definitely will not miss these beds!  The rooms were comfortable - but six people and one shower... Interesting in the morning:

I'll definitely miss the goats - not every conference has goats you know (it is true! believe it or not)

 All in all, the housing was very nice, some 1,100 'cottages' all over the place.  Lots of people around (besides the conference attendees).  It was definitely fun (and don't let Jonathan Lewis know that I picked up a thing or two from his session)...

On the way out the door, I spied some artifacts from Mogens Oracle Museum, a copy of the Version 3 and Version 4 Oracle:

 I picked up the documentation and was browsing through it, stumbled upon a chapter on the ORDER BY clause.  Learned something new.  I thought ORDER BY had always sorted NULLS to be "high" (big).  Until 8.1.6 with analytics when they extended the ORDER BY to support NULLS FIRST and NULLS LAST so we could decide.  But apparently in Versions 3 and 4, it was different:

It says there that NULLS always come first.  And sure enough:

So, over time - things change.  Hey, that was part of my presentation on Friday night.  That is what makes "experts" wrong so many times.  Because things change and what they think they know - just ain't so anymore.