QuickStart Guide to Db2 Development with Python

Chapter 1

What Is IBM Db2?

In 1969, while working at IBM’s San Jose Research Laboratory in San Jose, California, Edgar Frank Ted Codd introduced a new concept for managing information in a paper titled "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." And, over the next four years, a group of researchers at IBM worked to create a data management system prototype that was based on the relational model described in Codd’s paper. (This prototype was named System R—short for System Relational.) Recognizing that a new language was needed to interact with System R, Codd published a second paper titled "A Data Base Sublanguage Founded on Relational Calculus" in 1971; this paper became the foundation for a new language called DSL/Alpha, which was quickly renamed SEQUEL (for Structured English QUEry Language) and later shortened to SQL—an acronym for Structured Query Language.

As part of an effort to port the System R prototype to its System/370 mainframe, IBM began work on a new product called DATABASE 2 (or DB2) in 1980. And, on June 7, 1983, DB2 was made available to a limited number of customers. Two years later it became generally available to customers running the Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) operating system on System/370 servers.

Thus, IBM Db2 is an RDBMS that is based on Codd’s relational model; it is a data management system that consists of a set of formally described data objects that are used to store and link data values by establishing some type of relationship between them. Typically, data is organized into tables, which are user-defined objects that present data as a collection of unordered rows with a fixed number of columns. (Each column contains values of the same data type, and each row contains a set of values for one or more columns; the representation of a row is called a record, the representation of a column is called a field, and the intersection of a row and column is referred to as a value or cell.) This results in a very efficient way to store data, as values only have to be stored once: data in tables can be accessed and assembled in a variety of ways to facilitate any number of operations.

Since its introduction in 1983, new features and functionality have been added in every new release (and many times, with fix packs as well). As a result, Db2 has become an enterprise-level, high-performant RDBMS that delivers both the four basic functions of persistent storage (create, retrieve, update, and delete, or CRUD) and the four properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability, or ACID) that guarantee data validity, even when unexpected incidents occur.

From the Mainframe to Distributed Platforms and the IBM Cloud

In 1987, DB2 arrived on the personal computer (PC) in the form of an offering called Database Manager, which was one of two special add-on products that came with the Extended Edition version of OS/2 (a new operating system for PCs that IBM released that same year). A year later, a version for IBM’s new AS/400 server emerged