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Db2 Through the Decades

Nov 4, 2026

DB2, Trivia

Db2 Through the Decades

Sonja Soderlund

Sonja Soderlund is an Oregon-based B2B freelance writer. Whether writing about mainframe computers, educational technology, or sustainable retail, she strives to bring clarity to complex issues. Connect with her or LinkedIn.

For more than four decades, Db2 has been a cornerstone of enterprise data management—but its roots stretch back even further, to IBM research in the 1970s and the early development of the relational database model and SQL.

Along the way, Db2 evolved from a new approach to managing data into a platform built for high-volume transaction processing, data sharing, continuous delivery and mission-critical workloads. Its history includes influential researchers, important architectural milestones and more than a few naming changes.

How well do you know the story behind Db2? Take our quiz and test your knowledge of the pivotal developments that helped shape one of IBM’s most enduring database technologies.

1. Which 1970 paper by IBM researcher Edgar F. Codd laid the theoretical foundation for relational databases?

 
 
 
 

2. Which two IBM researchers are credited with creating the language that became SQL?

 
 
 
 

3. Patricia Selinger made what particularly important contribution to IBM’s System R project?

 
 
 
 

4. Raymond Lorie, another member of the System R team, contributed an idea that has a familiar echo in modern DB2. What was it?

 
 
 
 

5. Before DB2 appeared, IBM announced its first relational database product for the VM/VSE mainframe environment in 1981. What was it called?

 
 
 
 

6. On which operating-system platform did the original DB2 make its mainframe debut?

 
 
 
 

7.  Which Db2 for z/OS release introduced IBM’s continuous-delivery model, allowing many new capabilities to arrive through the service stream rather than waiting for another full release?

 
 
 
 

8. Don Haderle, often described as the “father of DB2,” regarded 1988 as a pivotal year because DB2 Version 2 demonstrated that relational databases were viable for which type of workload?

 
 
 
 

9. Which major DB2 capability was delivered with Version 4 and became closely associated with Parallel Sysplex?

 
 
 
 

10. Which version of the mainframe database was the first to launch natively under the lowercase ‘Db2’ branding portfolio change in 2017?

 
 
 
 

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