There are a number of commercial databases which I have had experience in working with, and they are (in both my order of preference and probably because of my length of experience in):
I would like to have had the opportunity to work on DB2, but I left the organisation which was implementing it before they did so. Sad really.
I like Oracle however for its quite rich toolset of operations for the developer. I often found myself wanting for supported functions such as the wonderfully handy date functions ( like LAST_DAY() ). Once you've worked with this toolset it is dreadfully unproductive working without them. Sure, you can create your own feature set in any other database which supports server side user functions but who does?
Over the years such ideas as a 'perfect virtual' machine and even specification language have spawned generations of programming languages (some of which I've worked with) and perhaps its fair to say that Java is one such thing. But at the end of the day, I feel that attempts at creating the 'babel fish' of programming langages just isn't worth it. Its even counter to the human experience, in which we create (seemingly endlessly) new 'language' to fit our specific task. If you don't know what I'm talking about, then just go speak with a philosopher (if you're an engineer) or an economist (if you're anyone else) and I'm sure you'll be hearing words which seem like normal language, but don't seem to make sence. Perhaps if such a 'universal language' would exist it may lie in the realm of true Virtual Machines like VM ware.
The bottom line is that the most effective and efficient way of expressing what the machine has to do will probably depend on the task and the "ecology" of the computer environment. Accordingly over the years of having to do things from massage data extracted from flat files to serializing objects, meant I needed to gain a kit bag of languages and structures to operate in the appropriate environment.
So, the languages that I've had to use in a commercial context are:
sadly I'm getting a little rusty in some of the more favourite of these, but then that's how the wheel turns (and noone seems to be enamored of C anymore).
These are mainly imperative and object oriented languages, but this is not always the only way to go, even if you only have a glancing aquaintance with recursion its certainly handy to have some experience in understanding functional languages. So as a student I'll say that I also learnt and needed to know:
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