IBM Db2

There's like this government SOAP API that we can call to make the check.

And then you store this application into a record in this DB2 database in the mainframe.

That was the project.

Car Connections 392, hello sir, how are you? I am doing very well, Car Connections.

Most of my life, I was a DBA.

Back as far as, oh man, DB2.

I started as a programmer in the early, early days.

I'm almost ashamed to say I wrote COBOL.

They're still out there.

Yeah, that's true.

And I was actually a COBOL DBA on DB2.

And then things progress and you do databases on all sorts of different systems.

Started in the mid-nineties.

I worked at IBM, worked on DB2 and enterprise databases.

And, and then I did something a little crazy.

I decided I liked databases so much, I went to grad school.

But it turns out for agentic applications, just the schema itself is actually not even enough.

Forget getting to how schema changes.

Back in the day when I first worked on DB2, almost thirty years back, I was wondering, "Why does the SQL standard let you say add a comment?" I don't know if you know.

When you say an object create table, you can add a comment to it.

And I worked at a bank for a little bit as like an analyst on like the data warehousing side, and it was like, you're right, there's this transition in the data stack where it's like Oracle, SQL Server, right? People are getting off the mainframes.

I, DB2, you know, going.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, yeah.

I'm sure my bank has multiple systems behind the mobile app that I use to pay for things or move money or check balances.

My guess is there's some DB2.

I know there's some SQL Server there.

Maybe some analytics for, you know, new or no SQL stuff in there as well.

And maybe not five or six platforms, but almost none of the customers I work with have less than three platforms in the organization, and sometimes all three in an application.

Somehow, somewhere, somebody added a Postgres server to an Oracle SQL Server environment.

Or MongoDB crept in when somebody thought it was a better data store than DB2 or MySQL.

An article written about how Facebook or Spotify or some other high tech company use Cassandra or Snowflake inspired a developer to add that to their tool belt and build it into the software.