Pretty sure Germany uses Excel and variety of DBMS's. What do you think makes Palantir any different?
This is the key. Germany doesn't have a central citizen database or something like that, but each municipality has a system on their own. Any bad actor can't search through that to discriminate, deport or whatever people. This of course also leads to problems like paying out corona support money to students still isn't completely done etc.
Palantir tries to create an Über-Database.