IBM Fellow Don Haderle is the only person who can claim to have been both the “father” and “mother” of DB2*.
In the 1980s, more than one person who had worked on the DB2 project had been called the “Father of DB2” in press announcements. So during a database show in San Francisco, when Haderle and several panelists were asked their titles, he responded
“ ‘The Mother of DB2 because the Father of DB2 title was already taken.’ So they called me the Mother of DB2 for quite some time,” he recalls. However, Janet Perna, the management executive lead for DB2 on open systems at the time, later dubbed him the “official” Father of DB2. “And when I retired, that was the title they gave me in a press article. So it was a name IBM gave me; I didn’t make it up.”
Haderle spoke about the development of the database management system (DBMS) and its lasting impact on the mainframe and beyond.
What spurred the development of DB2?
Don Haderle (DH): IBM derived most of its revenue and profit from mainframe hardware, including peripherals. DBMS customers used more storage and processing capacity than others, so IBM sought to drive greater DBMS adoption. However, IBM depended on ISVs to support the latest IBM hardware. These vendors often delayed doing so until the new hardware enjoyed a strong installation base. This slowed hardware sales. As a result, IBM’s storage division funded the development of an advanced DBMS and transaction systems in 1976.
What had come before DB2 and what made a new approach necessary?
DH: Early DBMSs, such as IBM’s IMS* and Cullinet’s Integrated Database Management System, supported bill of materials, material resource planning and other applications critical to business processes in manufacturing, finance, retail and other industries. These products featured hierarchical or network data models and provided both database and transaction management services.
However, database schema changes required rewriting application programs, and programmers had to understand the complex principles of concurrency and consistency—advanced thoughts at the time. As a result, application upgrades were often complicated and time-consuming; and it was difficult to share a database with distinctly different applications.
From a mainframe user’s perspective, what need were you seeking to address?
DH: Customers pressed for a solution to their application backlog, which was measured in terms of years in some cases. They wanted a database that could respond to rapid development for diverse applications doing transactions, batch and interactive access. They were willing to suffer some hit in cost performance over IMS and CICS* to respond to their business initiatives quickly. This was the design point for DB2—orders of magnitude improvement in the application development cycle for databases to perform transactions and business intelligence.
Where did your team begin?
DH: The relational prototype from IBM Research, called SystemR, offered a great base for starting. IBM Fellow Ted Codd published his famous paper in 1969 for the exposition of the relational database model. The IBM Research team, among others, put together a prototypical example of that model. They came up with the concrete specification, which was SQL, and they put together that prototype and wrote a paper in 1976 that exposed the language and the prototype, which was SystemR. That was a “Wow!” back in that era. The folks that developed SystemR worked right next door to us in San Jose, and so we went up to chitchat with them
DH: The relational prototype from IBM Research, called SystemR, offered a great base for starting. IBM Fellow Ted Codd published his famous paper in 1969 for the exposition of the relational database model. The IBM Research team, among others, put together a prototypical example of that model. They came up with the concrete specification, which was SQL, and they put together that prototype and wrote a paper in 1976 that exposed the language and the prototype, which was SystemR. That was a “Wow!” back in that era. The folks that developed SystemR worked right next door to us in San Jose, and so we went up to chitchat with them
What is the origin of the DB2 name?
DH: IMS DL/I was IBM’s first database—hence, DB ONE. There was a contest—I was heads down on the technical stuff—and the marketing folks came up with DB2.
DH: IMS DL/I was IBM’s first database—hence, DB ONE. There was a contest—I was heads down on the technical stuff—and the marketing folks came up with DB2.
How did it revolutionize databases?
DH: The revolution was a single database and the relational model, for transactions and business intelligence
DH: The revolution was a single database and the relational model, for transactions and business intelligence
At the time, did your team realize the impact DB2 would have?
DH: Did we think it would last for 30 years? We were hopeful, but first we needed to ensure the long-term survival of the mainframe and port DB2 to open systems platforms, like UNIX*, on IBM and non-IBM hardware. But that is a longer story.
DH: Did we think it would last for 30 years? We were hopeful, but first we needed to ensure the long-term survival of the mainframe and port DB2 to open systems platforms, like UNIX*, on IBM and non-IBM hardware. But that is a longer story.
Though it launched in 1983, you point to 1988 and DB2 V2 as a seminal point in its development. Why?
DH: In 1988, DB2 V2 proved it was viable for online transactional processing [OLTP], which was the lifeblood of business computing. It had already proven its capability to perform analytical queries, but 1988 made it viable for the heart of business processing —OLTP. At that point, it could yield adequate performance metrics—transactions per second—though it was still more expense in compute cost vis-à-vis IMS DL/I, but Moore’s Law would continue to narrow that gap.
DH: In 1988, DB2 V2 proved it was viable for online transactional processing [OLTP], which was the lifeblood of business computing. It had already proven its capability to perform analytical queries, but 1988 made it viable for the heart of business processing —OLTP. At that point, it could yield adequate performance metrics—transactions per second—though it was still more expense in compute cost vis-à-vis IMS DL/I, but Moore’s Law would continue to narrow that gap.
What has been the lasting impact of DB2 at IBM?
DH: DB2 was key to establishing the IBM software business and making IBM an overall solution provider—hardware, software, services. As I said earlier, IBM was a hardware company in the 1970s and the software was sponsored by the hardware businesses to support their platforms. We reported to our respective hardware executives.
DH: DB2 was key to establishing the IBM software business and making IBM an overall solution provider—hardware, software, services. As I said earlier, IBM was a hardware company in the 1970s and the software was sponsored by the hardware businesses to support their platforms. We reported to our respective hardware executives.
DB2’s early success, coupled with IBM WebSphere* in the 1990s, led the transformation of the business and engendered the investments that made that happen. Thus the survival of DB2 is a product of the completeness and competitiveness of the IBM software portfolio, not just the excellence of DB2 itself.
Looking back, what’s been the most surprising use for DB2?
DH: When you say “surprising,” I tend to think of applications—the moon launch, open-heart surgery or some other gee-whiz application. The closest thing for DB2 was the database system for the Olympics for several games [the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano] when there was extreme pressure on performance and any failure was visible to the world. What made that a pressure moment was that as soon as the game was played, the race was run and the scores were posted, it was immediately available to all the press around the world. If they didn’t have the information immediately after the event—and there were hundreds of thousands of queries done on this thing—then we had egg all over our faces.
DH: When you say “surprising,” I tend to think of applications—the moon launch, open-heart surgery or some other gee-whiz application. The closest thing for DB2 was the database system for the Olympics for several games [the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano] when there was extreme pressure on performance and any failure was visible to the world. What made that a pressure moment was that as soon as the game was played, the race was run and the scores were posted, it was immediately available to all the press around the world. If they didn’t have the information immediately after the event—and there were hundreds of thousands of queries done on this thing—then we had egg all over our faces.
Where do you see DB2 in 30 years?
DH: In the same position as today—a vital database infrastructure for core business processing within enterprises. While there’s another business need being addressed by NOSQL and NEWSQL databases that will evolve, DB2 will serve the basic business transactions and business intelligence as it does today, evolving to respond to the big data business needs that demand aggregation of data within and outside the enterprise in surprising volumes with surprising velocity.
DH: In the same position as today—a vital database infrastructure for core business processing within enterprises. While there’s another business need being addressed by NOSQL and NEWSQL databases that will evolve, DB2 will serve the basic business transactions and business intelligence as it does today, evolving to respond to the big data business needs that demand aggregation of data within and outside the enterprise in surprising volumes with surprising velocity.
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