Extract substring from a field with single awk in AIX

I have a file file with content like:

stringa    8.0.1.2     stringx
stringb    12.01.0.0    stringx

I have to get a substring from field 2 (first two values with the dot).
I am currently doing cat file | awk '{print $2}' | awk -F. '{print $1"."$2}' and getting the expected output:

8.0
12.01

The query is how to do this with single awk?
I have tried with match() but not seeing an option for a back reference.
Any help would be appreciated.

>Solution :

You can do something like this.

$ awk '{ split($2,str,"."); print str[1]"."str[2] }' file
8.0
12.01

Also, keep in mind that your cat is not needed. Simply give the file directly to awk.