The sheer size of the federal government and its age would mean there are thousands of databases out there. Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
That alone makes his comment come from a place of ignorance. Of course it's confident ignorance. The worst kind.
I'd bet that the government is probably the largest user of SQL. Unless there are really old systems that predate SQL. I'd imagine they have shitloads of COBOL for example.
This sounds just like a former manager that thought nosql was the end all and that SQL had no place.
If course they developed their app that required frequent data migrations because they were in fact very dependent on all the records matching the latest schema.
The sheer size of the federal government and its age would mean there are thousands of databases out there. Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
That alone makes his comment come from a place of ignorance. Of course it's confident ignorance. The worst kind.