No worries. I believe that worldwide most WhereScape customers are on Microsoft. I can understand the ELT approach is different from what you might be used to. ELT uses SQL as the transformation language, and on MS WhereScape RED generates all the T-SQL code for moving and transforming data in the form of stored procedures. This code is optimised out of the box, but this can be edited / augmented in WhereScape and overwhelming developer feedback is that SQL is the prefered technology for developing, troubleshooting and performance tuning data processing (even when using SSIS) because it is so mature and well understood.

At the moment dimension processing does use cursors, but the standard code prunes the cursor using a SET based exclusion reducing cursor processing to only new or changed data - and I have seen it used without modification on large dimensions (10s of millions of members) without incurring a performance hit. Of course you have the ability to change this code if you want to. The next version of WhereScape will provide a SET based option for SCD processing.

WhereScape does use ODBC for reading / writing meta data (only used as last resort for loading or processing data) - and in a team environment it is less confusing if a standard set of ODBC connections are used. All WhereScape code / objects are built in the database, which means these objects can be interrogated using SSMS - or any other database tool.

I know that VS / BIDS provides a common development environment for the MS tools, but the big difference with WhereScape is that the meta data is shared. SSIS doesn't use the same meta data as SSAS or the database - they are developed separately, although in the same IDE. What WhereScape does is relate objects together through the shared meta data - indexes with tables, tables with tables (eg in a star), processing with tables, cubes with stars, workflow with tables, etc - and this provides enormous benefits to developer in WhereScape when making changes or iterating in an agile project.

I am not saying the MS tools are bad - they have good interfaces, but i believe WhereScape provides a more integrated development environment because it has been built to develop all aspects of the data warehouse as one process.

Let me know if you want to catch up off-line. Have a merry one..