Isn’t strange that this talent shortage never translates itself into decent rates?

Rubbish!

I have an iPhone 16 and it has a sim slot.

It's one of those weird situations where both the Left and Tucker Carlson actually agree on something.

I used to do similar work. Back in the day I used 25 TB as the cut off point for single node design. It’s certainly larger now.

You’re absolutely right about the organizational dynamics.

Many mangers in large companies, derive their status and power from a knowledge of existing business processes and procedures. Any substantive changes to those procedures obviously represent an existential threat to that position and they generally resist it, often very vigorously.

Kent’s original book is a masterpiece. He pretty much defined data modelling nearly fifty years ago. It’s depressing how little of real interest has been added since.

For the reasons you rightly pointed out, the current edition is a disaster.

I tried to get through the book, but I was bored out of my mind. Chapter after chapter, it wasn't getting to any coherent point.

I seem to remember that I really long initial chunk of the book consisted of presenting a barrage of self-evident problems in the modeling of real world entities in databases, without offering any solutions.

There's no shortage of people that will fill your ears with problems, so tuning that kind of talk out after a while could actually be an evolutionary self-defense mechanism.

Even as an entry level business analyst you’re probably make more than a COBOL programmer. Don’t touch it.

As somebody who has written both COBOL and APL, I can assure you that they are both obsolete.

You certainly won’t hit it with most corporate OLAP processing, which is nearly all read-only SQlite. Writes are generally batched and processed outside ‘normal’ business hours, where the limitations of SQlite writing are irrelevant.

Where are they batched?

In a separate system maintained by the DuckDB cargo cultists.

I would go even further and argue that vast majority of businesses will never need to think about distributed systems. Modern hardware makes them irrelevant to all but the most niche of applications.

I had a longer comment elsewhere but to me this says that the distribution is happening somewhere and what you're also saying is that companies have to decide how much they want or care to control it.

No. The issue is whether you NEED to not whether you want to.

10 to 15 years ago, you could argue, however implausibly, that hardware constraints meant vertical scaling was impossible, and you were forced to adopt a distributed architecture. Subsequent improvement in hardware performance, means that in 2025, vertical scaling is perfect acceptable in nearly all areas, relegating distributed architecture to the most niche and marginal applications. The type of applications that the vast majority of businesses will never encounter.

There is essentially no tooling for this and vendors all default to distributed patterns. Either you directly control the scaling or you're relinquishing it.