Hi There,

WhereScape does do things differently than what you are probably used to, but once you get used to it you should be more productive building a data warehouse than using the MS suite. The key thing to get your head around is that RED treats the data warehouse as a holistic thing rather than the fractured way you are probably used to doing in MS tools. For example WhereScape will generate a data warehouse table, the processing to populate it (in SQL), indexes, version history, workflow and documentation in one standardised technology, one place, one tool. Change management is assisted by regeneration of all of the above should a change be made and guided by impact reports generated from the metadata. The MS suite breaks things into silos - ETL in SSIS, table design in something, manual index and table creation in SMSS, documentation in Word (if at all), workflow in SQL agent jobs, cubes in BIDS with nothing really tying the parts together.

As far as processing goes SSIS might have more tasks to choose from but in many situations it is not as fast as SET based processing in the database, is harder to troubleshoot, certainly harder to change (with no real impact analysis) and provides no operational framework. Newer versions of WhereScape RED will support newer database features.

In NZ people generally need to do more with less - that is why WhereScape is popular. I hope that this helps - BTW have you been trained in WhereScape?