Ten years ago data engineering was another discipline in software engineering, like backend or frontend. Somewhere along the line the term was co-opted by “I can maybe barely string together some untested airflow pipelines” and it means something much different now.
It is said that every major, still living COBOL program contains a bespoke, (sometimes poorly optimized) database engine with no standard query language, the only query tool was more program code. Perhaps the longevity of Mainframes points to there was some wizardry/safety lost in standardizing databases, giving people the impression that data itself was standard and too many tools to footgun data into foot pain, that we lost when databases were defined entirely as COBOL internals?
(Not that we haven't gained a lot from modern database tools, just something to think about that maybe the data siloes were good sometimes, too.)
