Lance,

I have to say that I've been building DW's for more than 10 years in both MS BI toolset and Wherescape and have to agree with you on this one. Wherescape was specifically built for ELT/ETL, MS just shuffled DTS/SSIS into that ETL/ELT hole they had in their suite.

NoBIBummer,

I've been there so I understand that it's a different interface and once you get used to dragging task by task in DTS/SSIS, moving to RED where you drag tables directly and most SQL is automatically done for you, takes some time to get used to it and see what RED does 'under the hood'.

Regarding whether it makes sense to use RED in a MS environment, I think it complements beautifully with SSRS and SSAS, you get in my opinion the best of both worlds, the strongest of the MS suite (DB+OLAP+Reporting) with a much better ETL/ELT solution than SSIS. SSIS is great for some tasks but managing a 100+ package DW environment is practically impossible, just wasn't built for that. Trust me, been there, and trying to coordinate all the dims to process first and then the facts and so on and ending up in spider web type approaches that don't escalate well.