Comment by ndriscoll

This particular thing might be difficult to change because it's 50 year old COBOL or whatever, but my point was more that I've encountered pushes from architects to "eliminate batches" and it makes no sense. It just means that now I have to re-batch things in my code. The correct way to think about it is that you want smaller, more frequent batches.

Do they really need to do work on all records every night? Probably not. Most people aren't changing their license or vehicle info most days. So the problem is that somewhere they're (conceptually) doing a table scan instead of using an index. That might still be hard to fix, but at least identify the correct problem. Otherwise as you say moving to different tech won't fix it.