As part of my job I travel a lot within Europe. Most countries accept the Euro and participate in the Schengen Agreement (forming the Schengen Area) which means borderless travel and few, if any, controls (more that in a future blog post). What remains are the different languages and the different culture, including food. During one of the recent journeys I came up with a nice comparison of the DB2 SQL (Oracle) Compatibility and understanding the different European languages.
For the performance of PL/SQL and the Oracle SQL dialect in DB2 we often have to point out that statements are compiled to regular DB2 runtime code (so-called sections and packages). At runtime DB2 basically doesn't know whether DB2's SQL or the Oracle-like syntax was used. Both perform equally well as there is only one runtime infrastructure, no emulation. The same is true for SQL vs. XQuery, there is the same single runtime infrastructure.
In school I learned English, Latin, and French, later at university Spanish. I don't speak Latin, French, or Spanish fluently, but I understand enough to get around. The same for Dutch, Danish, etc. What that means is that I don't need a translator, but can directly understand local road signs, hotel employees, newspapers. This gives a "performance advantage", again, as I (my "runtime infrastructure") can process the languages directly, not all ("compatibility rate"), but enough for most common situations. Here DB2 and I differ as DB2 has a higher compatibility rate...