Stayed away from Cobol since I was a chem major at the time I was taking computer courses. Took to fortran like a duck to water. It just made SENSE!
So did SPSS. PL/1 and APL were not intuitive at all.
As far as databases go, back in the day I had my own data company (after a stint as a machine language programmer for a small software and hardware firm) and we did custom databases in dBase and "desktop publishing" in Wordstar (anyone remember CP/M?)
I was going to switch my major to computers but my advisor said not to because there were not enough jobs to go around and there were more programmers around then they would ever need!
Realize this was in '73-''74 and was WAY before the PC (OR Apple or Commodore or Trash80 or Atari even exited (There weren't even home video games, let alone cell phones, then--we played pong and asteroids in bars by dropping in quarters!)
Good memories!