This is the only beginning book that presents DB2 from the COBOL programmer's point of view. But that of course is what you need if you're writing COBOL programs that process DB2 databases on an IBM mainframe. Twelve complete programs show you how to use embedded SQL statements within a COBOL program. Along the way, you'll learn how to: design and code DB2 programs; use inner joins, outer joins, and unions to combine data from two or more tables; use column functions to extract summary data; work with variable-length data and nulls; use error handling techniques, COMMIT, and ROLLBACK to protect the validity of DB2 data; use locking and concurrency features right so you don't tie up the whole database; use DB2I (a TSO facility) to develop DB2 programs interactively or in batch; and create test data using SPUFI and QMF.